The Megamachine and Green Growth Delusions
In this interview with freelance writer Christopher Ketcham, we unpack the techno-industrial extractivism that plagues modern societies and the media’s complicity in failing to challenge the growth model on which it is based. We discuss Chris’ book This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West in which he outlines the environmental destruction caused by unregulated public lands livestock grazing, corruptly supported by the federal land management agencies, who are supposed to be regulating these industries. He tracks the Department of Interior’s failure to implement and enforce the Endangered Species Act and investigates the destructive behavior of U.S. Wildlife Services in their shocking mass slaughter of animals that threaten the livestock industry.
We also chat about the green growth ideology behind the lithium mining at Thacker Pass in Nevada which is driving the destruction of ecosystems and species as well as the displacement of local Indian tribes from what they consider to be their sacred lands. This same ideology, combined with the failure to acknowledge and reckon with the realities of ecological overshoot, has captured many leading environmental groups to abandon their commitment to nature conservation in order to prioritize industry interests. Chris’ vision of ecological restoration calls for freeing the trampled, denuded ecosystems from the effects of grazing, enforcing the laws already in place to defend biodiversity, allowing the native species of the West to recover under a fully implemented Endangered Species Act, and establishing vast stretches of public land where there will be no development at all, not even for recreation.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
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Chris Ketcham 0:00
We are increasingly lost because such a large and growing portion of our populations don't have the benefit of being able to access the natural world. And then the irony being that as the population grows, and you have access on a mass scale, the very experience in the natural world as a place of contemplation, meditation, solitude, and understanding gets wiped away. Because instead you have crowds, and you have businesses that cater to the crowds. So suddenly, you've got industry, the recreation industry, and then you've lost the very thing you're seeking in the natural world, which is, I believe, a sense of the total insignificance of homo sapiens. And if we had that sense, repeatedly reinforced, I think it will help in our relations with others and help how we view our place in the world.
Alan Ware 1:00
In this episode of the Overpopulation Podcast, we'll be talking with Christopher Ketchum, a US-based freelance writer and journalist. In a media landscape that is largely in service to mainstream growthism Chris's tireless reporting of the unvarnished truth of our ecological predicament is a beacon of inspiration.
Nandita Bajaj 1:27
Welcome to the Overpopulation Podcast where we tirelessly make ecological overshoot and overpopulation common knowledge. That's the first step and right sizing the scale of our human footprint so that it is in balance with life on Earth, enabling all species to thrive. I'm Nandita Bajaj co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware 1:49
I'm Alan ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance, the first and only nonprofit organization globally that draws the connections between pronatalism, human supremacy, and ecological overshoot and offers solutions to address their combined impacts on the planet, people, and animals. And now on to today's guest. Christopher Ketchum has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years with a focus on environment and ecology. He has been published in Harper's Counterpunch, National Geographic, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Salon, Sierra Earth Island journal, and many other websites and newspapers large and small. He is the author of This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism and Corruption are Ruining the American West. And he's currently working on a book about the collapse of industrial civilization.
Nandita Bajaj 2:43
Welcome to our podcast, Chris. It's exciting to be talking to you in real time. We, of course, discovered your writing a few years ago, and we were thrilled to discover a journalist who not only understood the dire planetary state we're in, but who could communicate that predicament so powerfully.
Alan Ware 3:02
Yeah, your writing that I've read in articles, your book, you've educated me on a lot of issues like national prak overcrowding, wild lands degradation in the West, green tech delusions, human supremacy, the limits to growth. And like all good writers you combine story and narrative, the emotional resonance, with what a lot of writers aren't as capable of doing the concepts, the ideas behind it. And I really appreciated that. And behind all that, I like your commitment to telling the truth about our ecological predicament, which I'm sure is difficult in a lot of the media, contemporary landscape. So thanks for your work and for coming on.
Chris Ketcham 3:42
You're very welcome. The reason the media doesn't address these things is most of the media are very comfortable with the status quo. Ergo, they're not going to bother to question where it's gotten us in terms of ecological degradation and where it's aiming us in terms of ultimate social chaos, biophysical collapse, and everything else that comes with infinite growth. So the media, all my good buddies at the New York Times and elsewhere, are themselves affluent bourgeoisie, who benefit from the status quo. They're very much embedded in maintaining the status quo. So why would they ever bother publishing journalism that questions the growth model? It's done very well for them. It's not doing very well for the billions of poor people on this planet. I'll tell you that. Or for people who are being subsumed into the industrial machine who had lived subsistence lives in relative harmony with the natural world, for example, remote tribes in Amazonia who are now being kicked off their lands in order to facilitate population settlement, growth, agriculture, ranching, and mining.
Nandita Bajaj 4:48
And you've captured a lot of that in your writing both in your book and your many articles. But we're going to start with your book first and then we'll move into some of your more recent writing. So your book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West. In it, you lay out the reasons for why the myth of American cowboy culture, the myth of the resourceful, individualistic, free spirit roaming the wide expanses of the American West, is just that an enormous myth. And in your own experience of researching for the book, how did you find that myth to square with the reality of the American West?
Chris Ketcham 5:29
Well, how about let's start with how I've found the myth itself or how I came to discover that my whole perception of the West as an easterner-gone-west was entirely wrong. I moved out to Moab, Utah, and I happened to go to a lecture by a guy named Josh Osher, who was the media outreach coordinator for a group called Buffalo Field Campaign. This is 2006 roughly. And he comes in, he makes a presentation about how the last wild, free-roaming, genetically pure herd of buffalo in Yellowstone National Park is being persecuted to protect the livestock industry of Montana - the claim of the livestock industry being that when the buffalo roam outside of the borders of Yellowstone Park, they threatened to spread to the cattle herds of Montana a disease called brucellosis. This is a scientific falsehood. It was just a predicate for basically preventing bison - these beautiful wild creatures who are the last remnants of the herds that once numbered 60 million or 70 million on the Great Plains of this country. It's basically a livestock industry's excuse to prevent these animals from competing with livestock for forage on the public lands and the national forest and the BLM lands outside of Yellowstone National Park. So I heard this lecture and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, I thought cows were like native. I thought they were just here, man, and not unlike most easterners who go west, and they see cows on the landscape and they think, Oh, this is the normal course of affairs. There are cows grazing and look at that field of beautiful purple grass. Isn't it lovely? No. In fact, it's an invasive grass called cheatgrass, bromus tectorum, which is an incredibly destructive invasive weed that kills out native plants, and is in fact an indicator of biological depauperacy and ecosystem collapse. So if you don't have eyes to understand what's really going on, ecological eyes, and you don't meet up with someone randomly, like I did with this guy Josh Osher, to understand what's really going on with the cattle industry in the American West, you'll never figure out the reality on the ground of the public lands. So having heard this guy talk and heard the plight of the buffalo and heard the absurdity of the claims of the livestock industry with regard to the threat that the buffalo pose and having understood what's really going on, which is control of the public domain for the benefit of private interests, I thought to myself, well, this is actually a really big story because the cattle industry dominates the public lands of the American West - that is primarily the BLM and the Forest Service lands. We're talking about hundreds of millions of acres that are grazed and overgrazed by tens of millions of cattle every year to the detriment of native ecosystems, wildlife, flora, fauna, predators, the quality of water, air quality in terms of dust raised in the air due to desertification due to overgrazing that leads to desertification that leads to many dust bowls all over the West caused by cattle.
And so as I look more into the whole cattle culture of the American West, I realized what I was looking at, in fact, is an iteration of the same old principle of dominionism. You know, human dominionism is ingrained in western civilization, which, of course, is an offshoot of Christian civilization. So in the West, the cattle culture is very much dominionist. The cattle culture sees all the land as being there simply for subjugation, for the aggrandizement of the one chosen species, homo sapiens and their cows, and everything else has to be sacrificed for the progress of the chosen ones. And this to me was pretty fascinating in that the landscapes of the West, the public lands of the West, despite, you know, a century and a half or more of overgrazing and dominionism, and which includes of course, logging, and mining, and water diversions in massive agricultural projects that uproot native ecosystems and replace them with monocultures, well, these lands that have been subjugated, as I said, despite all this still retain pockets of incredible biodiversity and incredible wildness. And so I thought to myself, Hey, these are places that really need extraordinary protections, and that these are places that need to be preserved in an age when growth as homo sapiens threatens to take over every corner of the Earth with its greasy hands in the cookie jar everywhere, you know? That's what inspired me to write that book.
Alan Ware 9:59
Yeah, I learned from you about cows evolving as aurochs in Europe and much wetter climates. I guess I knew they weren't native to the west. But I thought, Oh, they must be very dry land adapted, or something. No, a whole other ecosystem.
Chris Ketcham 10:14
That's exactly what I thought. I thought, yeah wow, these cattle do so well in these arid land landscapes. Meanwhile, what's actually happening is what eventually became an industrial apparatus of intervention on the landscape is necessary for their survival. So the drilling of wells, the diversion of water for the production of hay, and then of course, the killing out of all the predators and other impediments to cows freely roaming the land. So the species is bos taurus, right, again, evolved from what is the...
Alan Ware 10:48
Auroch, I think?
Chris Ketcham 10:49
Oh, yeah, the auroch, that's right. You just said it, the auroch, right. And again, a species that would do better in, I don't know, Maryland or Florida. Or I've always thought that since the federal government so loves the cattle industry, that we should graze them on the Washington Mall. That'd be a great place for cattle this lot. It's very arid, it's very humid, there's lots of grass, we can plant some grass in the Lincoln Memorial, have them graze there on the White House lawn, you know, that kind of thing, but not in the West.
Alan Ware 11:23
And getting to that dominion idea, you wrote an excellent article about Thaker Pass in Nevada and about a lithium mine that they're looking to be developed. And the article is called Neocolonialism: Pillaging the Earth for the Climate. And that's a sort of dominionism of alternative energy and business as usual by alternative means, but it'll be clean, it'll be green, so it's all in service to something grand, and you found something very different. You want to tell us some of that story and what you think it reveals?
Chris Ketcham 11:55
Sure, yeah, the struggle at Thacker Pass begins with two dudes in their 30s, Max Wilbert and Will Faulk, who are both self-described members of Deep Green Resistance. Max Wilbert is a environmental activist, and Will Faulk is an environmental lawyer. So in January of 2021, they decided to camp out there starting on the same day that permits, final permits, were issued for the development of the Thacker Pass lithium mine, which has been developed by a company called Lithium America, a Canadian-based corporation. The idea of course, is that you dig out all that lithium, you can create batteries for electric vehicles, and then everything will be beautiful, and we'll all be driving Priuses and the world will be clean. And then God and the deus ex machina will come down and smile upon the world and, and climate change be over. That's it. We'll solve it by driving just a different kind of car. The enthusiasm by greens, by green groups for digging up lithium at a place like Thacker Pass, of all the negative environmental consequences is the result of a narrow, siloed, myopic view of the ecological crisis we face in the world, problematique of growthism versus the planet, right? So the idea being at Thacker Pass we'll dig out all this lithium. We'll poison some water. We'll kill out a lot of wildlife. We'll destroy a lot of flora and fauna. The local Indian tribes that consider this land sacred, well, you got to break some eggs to make this omelet. So out the Indians go from their sacred lands, sorry. So I went there with the intention of writing the alternative narrative, looking at how this Thacker Pass and the destruction of this landscape is just another iteration of the growthist monster. That is we're going to dig out all that lithium for what? So we can have more cars. But they're going to be clean and green cars, supposedly, or that's at least going to be the virtue signaling that goes on when you have the clean and green cars. So it's all of course, profoundly disgusting to me as a journalist to see these falsehoods proffered to the public shamelessly. And so that's, you know, one of the reasons the journalist goes to a place like that and says, Alright, let's find that real story here.
So at Thacker Pass I ended up camping with Max Wilbert and with a number of Native Americans from the Paiute, who were there on hand to sort of hold the ground and defend against the arrival of the bulldozers that would initiate you know, the first digging of the mine. So it was a beautiful thing to see these folks really invested in place and inland in the sense of holiness of that place. You know, it's not just some random piece of Earth, designated on a map for destruction for some greater good. It was a place of spirits in history, culture, and people deeply invested in the sense that this is sacred soil, land, air, sky, water - all of its sacred. But of course, what's the story with all these beleaguered attempts at opposing the mega machine? Well, the juggernaut wins - pretty much always. So as of this conversation, Thacker Pass is being torn to pieces. The camp was raided last June, and the protesters were dispersed. And the courts being de facto arms of capital, issued injunctions against the protesters from getting within, I don't know, a half mile of the site ever again. Otherwise, they will go directly to jail. And that's that. Thacker Pass is a done deal. That's why you know, I did a piece in Harper's published, it was the November cover issue. It's called "The Machine Breaker". It's about a guy who's an eco-saboteur. And I think in some cases, you know, sabotage might be necessary to stop the machine. Maybe it's time to take some action against these machines that have behind them the whole armature of the police state, the surveillance state, the capitalist state, right, that always operates to make sure that the machines will have their way and the people need to get out of the way in service of growth and profits. That's the argument I tried to make in the Harper's piece without coming straight out and saying, Hey, sabotage is okay, let's go do it. But saying, in an age of ecocide, of ecological crisis of the scale that we're facing, and maybe we have to consider that once the authorities have stepped in and made sure that at a place like Thacker Pass the machines will have their way, well maybe some other action needs to be taken to stop them.
Nandita Bajaj 16:44
I mean, what you're describing with this kind of techno-industrial extractivism has been the playbook of what Bill Rees is described as you know, neocolonialism by legal means. When peaceful rebels are being put into jail, and then the real perpetrators of ecocide, businesses and governments, are getting away with what you've rightfully called neocolonialism. And we've kind of exported this mindset to the rest of the world where many people aspire to the kinds of things that we've idolized as this benchmark for a good life.
Chris Ketcham 17:23
Yeah, I mean, an extension of neocolonialism is advertising, marketing, publicity, the whole brainwashing propaganda complexes that constitute the system of envy creation, and the attack on self esteem, that marketing and publicity and advertising images amount to. I remember interviewing a Native American on the Wind River Reservation, a very poor place with a lot of terrible history in terms of colonialism, genocide, and the long term psychological and cultural effects of that. And one of the elders was saying how, once the airwaves come in, right, once the signals come in from the larger society, on, you know, on the television, on the radio, on the internet, on the smartphones, suddenly the young people in the culture are told that they are inadequate, that their culture's inadequate, that their experiences of their culture on the reservation are not as worthy as a Donald Trump descending a gold staircase or owning a nice car or having all the accoutrements of wealth, influence, and power. And so these are mind-poisoning systems that are everywhere warping how we view the world and how we view ourselves. And so I would add to neocolonialism the advertising and marketing system. All these journalists who can never make it in journalism and become writers for ad companies down in New York City. I love those people.
Alan Ware 19:03
So in your book, you also catalog all the instances of neglect and corruption by US federal agencies that often fail in their mission to protect the environmental integrity of public lands. Those agencies like Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife, the Forest Service. What are some of the most egregious abuses that stand out to you from your reporting?
Chris Ketcham 19:27
Well, I'd say the failure to really enforce the Endangered Species Act would be a good one, or the failure to really enforce wilderness values in established wilderness areas. So exceptions made to wilderness protections in service of the recreation industry, or ranching industry, and other industries that requires access. So, consider the Wilderness Act. The Wilderness Act basically says that it allows Congress to designate vast portions of the public lands as areas where no mechanized activities are allowed, where there are no roads, where basically the technical industrial complex shall be held at bay. Well, over the years, Congress has acquiesced to pressure from both, as I said, the recreation industry - so meaning backcountry skiers, hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers - which itself constitutes a pretty large, profitable business sector, right in this country, the recreation sector, and Congress has also count out and acquiesce to ranching interests, the both of which seek, let's say, exceptions to the wilderness rule. So for example, a bike is a mechanized machine, not allowed in wilderness. The mountain biking industry has got a lot of clout, especially in the American West and the mountain biking industry says, Oh, well, we don't, come on, we want to access these areas with our little machines. It's harmless. It's okay. Well, you punch a little hole in the law. And then suddenly, you've created opportunity for all sorts of other industries to do the same thing to undermine the law gradually through a death by thousand cuts.
With regard to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is tasked with enforcing the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service goes through endless, endless twister-like deceptions, right, to allow for development that threatens what they know, are endangered species. But they allow for corporations to submit environmental assessments and environmental impact statements that basically undermine the Endangered Species Act by saying, Okay, a little bit of development here. It's okay, because there's more of the species over here, or the level of development isn't such that you're going to compromise the species to the point of extinction. Well, and then it turns out that actually, because these ecosystems are often so fragile, and interconnected that you disturb one portion of it, suddenly there's cascading consequences elsewhere, for the ecosystem and for the species that depend on the ecosystem. So I mean, consider the greater sage grouse of the American West. I think it's Centrocercus urophasianus, a beautiful ground nesting bird that's considered a indicator species of the sagebrush sea of the West. All right, so the greater sage grouse should be protected on the Endangered Species Act. Problem is that if you actually issued protections commensurate with preserving this species, you'd shut out massive stretches of public lands for grazing, and massive stretches of public lands from mining and oil drilling, and fracking. So what happens? We don't issue any of the protections, even though all the sciences they're saying, hey, these protections need to be in place because the birds are dying. But it doesn't get done. And then you have you know, under Obama, you had Sally Jewell, former head of what was it The North Face or Patagonia, or one of these capitalist recreationist corporations standing before a group of faithful stakeholders in Colorado - the stakeholders being extraction interests, ranchers, and recreation interests, right, saying, trumpeting rather, that we've made all sorts of efforts to create exclusion zones where the greater sage grouse can survive, and indeed thrive. It was all a series of falsehoods, protections in the exclusionary zones were not commensurate with what was needed to protect the greater sage grouse. So there you have government, ensuring that the protections don't happen, because they're real client is capital.
Alan Ware 23:46
And the federal agencies get captured by capital - agency capture - which has an old and storied past, unfortunately. Yeah, the market fundamentalism of the 80s and 90s really put a lot of that into overdrive, I think, right? A lot of these laws are quite ambitious that you talked about - the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act - these great acts of the late 60s, early 70s in the US. And then starting in the early 80s, with deregulation and James Watt at the Department of Interior, you had just some conservative market fundamentalist backlash to that. And you detail how it hardly mattered whether it was Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, a lot of this continues, right? These agencies are still largely captured.
Chris Ketcham 24:34
Yeah, rape and pillage of the public lands is totally bipartisan, totally bipartisan. So this idea that you're going to elect a democratic regime and then suddenly, everything's gonna change, it's just, it's again, another falsehood. And it's really tedious to have to constantly debunk the same falsehood, just like, Yo man, past history is always an indicator of future behavior, always.
Alan Ware 24:57
And I learned a bit, just on this, I went out to North Dakota, the Teddy Roosevelt Badlands, and just learned about gophers or prairie dogs. I had no idea how much of a keystone species they are for that ecosystem, how they aerate the soil, they churn it. They provide burrows for all these other animals. They provide a lot of food for all these other predators. And they're just shot willy nilly in cattle country, right? I mean, they're not allowed to exist in large numbers.
Chris Ketcham 25:25
Prairie dogs are incredible, man.
Alan Ware 25:32
And I had no idea of their complexity of their communication. They have all these vocalizations about the size of the person, the speed, whether we've seen them before. It's like..
Chris Ketcham 25:43
Yes, yes, they have an incredibly complex life and they snuggle and you can see them if you go to a prairie dog town, you can see them popping out of the burrows. There'll be two, three at a time, and they'll nuzzle each other's cheeks, and they'll run around and they'll play and chase each other and, and there just incredible creatures. So beautiful, so cute. So snuggly and sweet. And so the forces of capital are just like, plow 'em over. So I was there. And I forget the name of the town, where a group of residents, mostly women, as it happens, organize the Priairie Dog Liberation Front, to try to stop a developer from paving over the beautiful prairie dog town to of course, to facilitate growth, for housing development, and a mall, and etcetara, etcetara. They failed to. The developer won. The prairie dogs were all killed. There's a pattern there. So but prairie dogs are incredible creatures. And this is a kind of little anecdote that will give some indication of, as you mentioned, the just cruel indifference that is exhibited towards prairie dogs in the American West. When I was living in Moab, Utah, out in the countryside, and there were a bunch of prairie dog towns near my cabin. And one day I was walking along, and there was a kid with a BB gun killing prairie dogs, just shooting them randomly, one after another. And the BBs of course, are not really a powerful enough bullet to kill, unless you strike the spine or the head. And so before him, on this prairie dog town, and if listeners don't know what a prairie dog town is, it's basically a underground burrow or den, or labyrinth, really, with multiple exits that are holes in the ground that are mounded slightly and so the prairie dogs will pop out, and then they'll run from entrance to entrance. And they'll gather forage and that kind of thing and gather food, and they'll often use their perches from these mounded holes, to look for predators, and just to talk with each other.
Okay, so around the town, our prairie dogs that have been wounded, and they're crawling, because their hindquarters have been shot. But they're crawling, crawling along, dragging themselves by their nails across the desert floor through the sagebrush, while this kid maybe a 14 year old is shooting them, one after another. And, you know, I told him to stop. He said, Why? I said, well look at them. They're just innocent prairie dogs, man and prairie dogs. He didn't stop. I started crying, actually. I walked away. I was so upset. So there you go. Prairie dogs, man, they're our brothers and sisters. And there's a species that should be protected in the Endangered Species Act, but can't do that, because you'll shut down huge development. You'll shut down malls and housing tracts and mining and drilling and grazing and especially grazing. Can't do that. You got to make way for the machine. So yeah, you mentioned prairie dogs. I do love prairie dogs. They're in a special, special place in my heart.
Nandita Bajaj 28:45
Yeah, thanks for that story. It's a moving story, because I think people sometimes become kind of numbed by listening to figures like 80 billion animals slaughtered in factory farms every year. And you know, all the millions of animals and populations kind of just being wiped out. But stories like this. And I think this is why your writing is so powerful, because I think people really do need to connect to individuals. These are individuals with families and friends and in and out groups like we do. And their lives are just completely being demolished. And as you've said, the organization's tasked to protect them have become collaborators with private companies. What are some of the most glaring examples in your mind of environmental organizations kind of selling out their stated principles for the sake of as you've said, this growth machine?
Chris Ketcham 29:41
Well I think the Nature Conservancy is front and center. They're truly an awful organization. If you look at for example, their board membership, I believe they have 18 board members. Something like four of them are environmental scientists, or in any way have any understanding of ecology. The other 14 are all captains of industry - members of the investor class, members of the one percenters, Wall Streeters, you know - and it shows in how the Nature Conservancy proceeds with policymaking. So, to take an example, I wrote a piece for Grist not long ago, in which I went down south to South Carolina and spent a lot of time with black communities there, who were complaining that the Nature Conservancy supports logging in their communities and the construction of wood pellet facilities for alternative green energy. And, of course, wood pellets are incredibly destructive. They're no more climate friendly than, you know, I think, a coal plant in terms of the total emissions. But the idea is that you kill off the trees, and then you turn them into wood pellets, and then more trees grow. And when those trees grow, they absorb the carbon that was produced by the burning of the trees. Well, of course, this elides the key component in the climate crisis which is time. These trees will not absorb carbon over a 20 year period, which is the period in which we really have to decarbonize. They absorb carbon over 50 to 100 to 150 to 200 year periods, only if they're allowed to grow big enough to do so, to become mature trees, which they're never allowed to do so under the regime of plantation growth that has been instituted across much of the Southwest. These plantations for the production of wood pellets are heavily supported by the Nature Conservancy. They love it. It's great. They love it to such an extent that last year, the NAACP decided to issue at its national convention a rebuke to the Nature Conservancy saying we call on you to stop supporting wood pellet production, to stop supporting the logging in these black communities, because these are environmental justice communities that are being inordinately affected by the policies that Nature Conservancy supports.
So an additional part of my reporting - not only looking at the toxic effects of the production of wood pellets in these black communities - were people who, for example, had no asthma prior to the arrival of wood pellet facilities and now are like crawling across the floor, like unable to breathe. Well, another effect of this is when you wipe out these forests, and you replant them, you have taken away the sink that absorbs rainfall during heavy rain events. So I talked with community members in these small rural villages all across South Carolina, who were saying that once logging - that had been approved and even celebrated by the Nature Conservancy - came into our community, suddenly, our streets are being flooded. Our homes are being flooded. People were abandoning these towns because, post-flooding, they didn't have the wherewithal to deal with the remediation necessary to stop, for example, the growth of black mold. So suddenly, black mold arises in houses with children, toxifying the children. So look at the chain of causality, right? It goes from the Nature Conservancy gets donations from unwitting Americans who think that they're supporting the conservation of nature when, in fact, it's a corporate front operation. That corporate front operation then partners with logging interests and alternative clean, green wood pellet manufacturers - the net effect, the toxifying of these communities, with eventually a child being poisoned by black mold because of flooding, that ultimately the Nature Conservancy is partially responsible for. That's a prime example of an NGO that purports to be preserving, protecting, conserving the natural world, when in fact, it's just a scam.
Alan Ware 33:40
They've become that carbon fundamentalist that they don't care about the biodiversity, because these are just plantations, right? So they're just fooling themselves that it's all about carbon, to hell with true nature-conserving. It's climate change and there's money to be made.
Chris Ketcham 33:57
But that's par for the course. I mean, when you look at most big, well-funded, known environmental NGOs, yeah, climate change is the thing that gets donors. It's the easy sell. And it's the idea that Bill Rees has talked about, which is again, the siloing of climate change into the one issue that we need to address rather than understanding it as part of the broad overshoot problem of overproduction, overconsumption, overpopulation. That doesn't sell well to a public that tacitly wants to maintain the status quo and explicitly does not want to make any sacrifices in order to preserve the natural world and in order to have an actually sustainable society.
Alan Ware 34:37
And a lot of those environmental leaders have taken on the kind of eco-modernist ideal, right, that technology can deliver us from our sins and allow growth to continue as usual.
Chris Ketcham 34:50
Absolutely. A lot of these groups have adopted two prongs, right - social justice and climate, and everything else goes out the window because it's not saleable. So these are people trying to jump on the social justice bandwagon, which is not the bailiwick of environmental groups, rather than focusing on what really needs to be done, which is protect and preserve the natural world from the mega machine, It's about selling things to the public, selling things to donors. But it's interesting that there's never been a merger between those who understand the struggles in our society as being based in class, and environmentalists, conservationists, and preservationists. Because the great majority of the destruction in the natural world is driven by the upper classes. So what if we could somehow merge class warfare with the preservation the natural world, like a tiny percentage of the population that's causing most of the damage here?
Nandita Bajaj 35:48
Yeah, I think that's an absolutely core aspect of what we really need to change. Often, I think, in the past, a lot of eco-defense groups have come across as misanthropic. You know, like, we want to save the Earth at the expense of humans. And sometimes the messaging has been conveyed that way. But there are so many groups like ours that are fighting for ecological and social justice. But you can see why there are so many social justice groups that are really suspicious of environmental groups.
Chris Ketcham 36:24
To interject here, one brief argument in favor of misanthropy, because when I look across the landscape of this civilization and culture, I find it hard not to be overwhelmed with misanthropy, overwhelmed with a feeling of loathing and disgust at what we've become. If this is the apogee of human affairs, then bring on the misanthropy because my, my loathing is fully formed and ready to explode. I think that if you look at, for example, just popular culture, and what is the utter filth and trash that is being pumped into the brains of young people. Right there that's an argument for misanthropy. It's like, Whoa man. I'm sorry but I mean, my point being is that cannot morph then into eliminationism, or an ideology that's anti-life. I mean, that's the problem. There have been over the years, like look at the guy who helped formulate the Tragedy of the Commons thesis, Garrett Hardin. By the end of his life, he was just this vile, nasty, bilious human being who was arguing openly for example, for like cutting off food supplies to starving children, because you just see his arguments while you're just perpetuate the problem. We have our lifeboat over here. We can't let these people into our lifeboat. Wow. Okay. So yeah, the charges of misanthropy, of hatred of mankind, if you look across the history of environmentalism and conservation, is sometimes well deserved. But I think frankly, we moved way beyond that. And so those people who still bring up those charges, they're living in an antiquated past.
Nandita Bajaj 37:41
And as you've talked about how this kind of growthist mentality is nonpartisan. Political affiliation has little to do with both growthism, but also protection of wild lands. And, you know, it doesn't matter if it's Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. So here's kind of a big question for you. And you may have already touched on it a bit. So you can you know, breeze through it more quickly is what do you think is at the core of what we need to change if we have any hope of an ecologically healthy planet?
Chris Ketcham 38:13
That's a transformation from homo sapiens being a dominionist, blindly cornucopianist, self- aggrandizing, narcissistic, ever-expansionist species to one that is altruistic, humble, practicing mutuality, not merely with others of our species, but with all species - a transformation of homo sapiens to something that we are not going to transform to, if history is any indication. We've known about, for example, carbon emissions since for a long time, and then, I mean, I was gonna say since 1988, James Hansen's famous testimony before Congress, but we've known about it long before that. The first mention of thermal pollutants due to burning of carbon and due to methane emissions was mentioned in 1975. We knew about greenhouse gases in the 1960s, or as early as I think, the late 50s. So what have we done? Nothing. Carbon emissions have been constantly rising. There's been no change whatsoever. But just because the history of inaction would suggest a totally pessimistic vision of the possibilities of the future does not mean I think that we shouldn't do anything about it. I always come back to the story of Sisyphus, and especially as the significance of this story was encapsulated in a book by Albert Camus called The Myth of Sisyphus. The idea is that Sisyphus is condemned in Hades to roll a rock up the hill, and it will always roll back down but he must continually push the rock up the hill. Now, Camus argued that, Yes all is hopeless, because all ends in death and nothingness. And yet we must love the rock. You must love the rock. Sisyphus needs to learn to adore his rock, even though he knows it's gonna roll right back down. So that's my take on the struggle for changing our society towards something better. I don't think we're going to succeed. But I think we have to rebel against the status quo and push that rock up the hill regardless.
Alan Ware 40:21
What do you think we could learn by more indigenous wisdom? Or how, what are the strengths and weaknesses of of that approach?
Chris Ketcham 40:30
Yeah, I think that traditional ecological knowledge, as it's now known - TEK - is extremely important. Absolutely. I don't think we should make the mistake of falsifying the image of Native Americans as being somehow pure of heart. They have pillaged and plundered and overgrazed and mined and dammed and flooded, and done everything they can - as poor people will do - to make money to survive. Okay, that's just the way it is. So even in Native American cultures, for example, the Navajo. The Navajo are divided into the traditionalists and the modernists, right? The modernists are like, well, let's mine for lithium and uranium, and it was uranium now, you know, coal, whatever it might be. And the traditionalists say, Well no, maybe we shouldn't do that. Maybe we should stick to traditional ecological knowledge. So indigenous cultures are not monoliths. There's cultural and class divisions within them. And so I think it's necessary for us to understand the complexities of what's going on in those societies. Now, in terms of the application of traditional indigenous knowledge for the predicament of mass industrial society, I don't think it applies. Because that indigenous knowledge was incubated in small groups - small, non-industrial, non- technological groups, that were managing their resources in a sustainable way, because they were small, and not industrial. So, to take traditional ecological knowledge and somehow make the leap to use that knowledge to feed 8.5 billion people - that's a fantasy. It's a nice fantasy, but it's a fantasy.
Alan Ware 42:15
Right. So injecting some ecological understanding and appreciation would be useful, combined with more ecological science, which has been severely underfunded relative to all other sciences. And it's only 100 years old. So it does seem like there's hope between the indigenous and some more western type of science.
Chris Ketcham 42:36
I think you nailed it. The merger, a marriage of traditional ecological knowledge and modern ecological science. I interviewed a Cree trapper and activist and practitioner of traditional ecological knowledge, named George Laneboy recently, and he's a president and founder of a research institute called the Chisasibi EU Resource Center, I believe that's the name, in Chisasibi, off James Bay in northern Quebec. His intention is to wed modern science with traditional ecological knowledge to understand the totality of negative environmental consequences from the mega-reservoir, hydropower systems, that the government of Quebec runs in tandem with the corporation, Hydro Quebec, all across northern Canada. So we're talking about huge areas that have been flooded with negative consequences downstream for wildlife, for fisheries, for life ways of the Cree. So I think absolutely, I think the merger of these two would be incredibly productive.
Nandita Bajaj 43:42
One of the things you've written really powerfully and eloquently about is the intense connection you feel with the natural world in places as varied as the arid western canyonlands of the US to right there in your backyard, where you are in the Catskills mountains of New York. Tell us a bit about how that connection to nature came to be. Is that really what keeps you going?
Chris Ketcham 44:06
Oh, yeah, yeah, without the forest out my door, I'd go insane. So I grew up in Brooklyn. I grew up like hardcore urban, you know, riding subways when I was like, seven or something, and, you know, so, but my mother had a little piece of property up in the Catskill Mountains, on the shanks of Mount Tremper, in the sort of the heart of the Catskill Mountains. And what she had was a little cabin that, it's the kind of cabin not even the Unabomber would rent. It's very primitive. There was no running water. There's no electricity. There's basically camping. And so we would go out there in the summer, and she would say, All right go off in the woods and come back in a day or so. And I would go off in the woods and come back in a day or so. And that introduced me to the power of the forest and the woods and the magical sight of a brook running through a green forest glinting in the sun, or the dappled floor, forest floor under a quaking of aspen leaves. Very powerful, very moving. And so that stays with you if you're exposed to it at a young age. So, yeah, I think absolutely the natural world - without it we're lost. And we are increasingly lost, because such a large and growing portion of our populations don't have the benefit of being able to access the natural world. And then the irony being that as the population grows, and you have access on a mass scale, the very experience in the natural world - as a place of contemplation, meditation, solitude, and understanding - gets wiped away, because instead you have crowds, and you have businesses that cater to the crowds. And so suddenly, you've got industry, the recreation industry, and then you've lost the very thing you're seeking in the natural world, which is, I believe, a sense of the total insignificance of homo sapiens. And if we had that sense repeatedly reinforced, I think it will help in our relations with others, and how we view our place in the world. So a sense of the cosmic, a sense of geological time, enormous scales in which we are but a mote of dust floating, that's really important. That, to me, is the most important message that the natural world can impart to us poor creatures, who know so little, but think we know so much. And I think that, Nandita, you've spoken many times about the toxicity of human supremacism. I think that spending a lot of time sitting in a woodland or a desert, or a mountain top or next to a running stream, or whatever natural form it might be, is a great antidote to human supremacism. We're encountering a grizzly bear, and being eaten by the grizzly bear.
Alan Ware 47:07
And there's plenty of research now with biophilia and all of the advantages nature gives people in mood and healing and awe. It's a major source of awe. And I've thought, maybe I read it somewhere, but to love anything or understand anything, you've first got to pay attention. And with the electronic screens and the high urbanization and the way that younger generations are even more cut off from having any attention. I think the average kid knows many more brand logos than trees in their neighborhood, like probably 10 times the number. So that, I have faith, unfortunately, that that will be cured. We will come back in touch with ecology. And I just hope that it doesn't have to be quite as hard of a way or is through much suffering as it would otherwise entail. But that is our natural state. And I don't think we can maintain this divorce from natural love, natural understanding, natural attention for very many more decades. Do you?
Chris Ketcham 48:12
Well, I wanted to ask, Why is your faith unfortunate?
Alan Ware 48:16
Well, I think because it could entail a lot of suffering.That would be the unfortunate part. We just had on the Post Carbon guys, Rob Dietz and Asher Miller, about the Great Unraveling and the report that they wrote about that, kind of also known as the polycrisis and the metacrisis and just that these coming decades will be quite difficult. And we have to hope that the future humanity that we hope can be more in touch with nature and ecology will be present.
Chris Ketcham 48:47
I think that it won't be as difficult as it has to be if we are able to tame our ambitions, right, and our expectations. We can lower our expectations, lower our ambitions, escape from the paradigm of manufactured desire, from this toxic trap of mind control of the marketers and the advertisers and the whole screen systems that inculcate into us false dreams, false desires, false hopes. If we can escape that, I think that it won't be as difficult as we imagine. It'll just be a re-localizing, a regionalizing, a living in place, living humbly. Like the vacation to Europe, okay. it's over with. Big deal, man. Big deal. What's lost? Not much. You can't always get what you want. And that's also part of it. You can't always get what you want. We have a culture that teaches us that we can always get what we want. Well no, sorry man, maturation, maturity requires understanding of limits.
Alan Ware 49:23
Plus, the attention and understanding that you give to what's right outside your door, like there in the Catskills, creates a love of place and an understanding of place that could be much deeper than going to Europe and knowing very little about what you're seeing.
Chris Ketcham 50:03
For example, there were a couple of years there when when my girlfriend and I had some land, some good land with water and a lot of sun exposure. And we grew huge crops. We had a gigantic garden. That experience, yeah, was far more profound than exotic travel, far more informative - an educational journey like none other, profoundly engaging in spiritually, psychologically, and socially satisfying. Something we did together, as an understanding and a sense of, wow, we're producing food, and we're understanding soil and we're understanding this slug is killing the kale crop, etcetera, etcetera.
Nandita Bajaj 50:45
The ground of our being right? You kind of get to understand how all of it is all connected. Thank you for doing the good work. We really appreciate We really appreciate the great writing that you're doing and that you could join us today.
Alan Ware 51:04
Thanks so much for all your work, and your speaking is as eloquent and inspiring as you're writing. You make for a great interview.
Chris Ketcham 51:13
Very happy to be here. Thank you very much.
Alan Ware 51:16
That's all for this edition of the Overpopulation Podcast. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations write to us using the contact form on our site, or by emailing us at podcast at populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and we hope that you'll consider a one time or recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj 51:45
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj, thanking you for your interest in our work and for your efforts in helping us all shrink toward abundance.
