Guy McPherson Interview

SUBHEAD: First and foremost, we should abandon the industrial economy to every possible extent. Then we should try to destroy it.  

Interview by JP Hayes on 29 April 2011 for KickItOver.com - 
  (http://kickitover.org/2011/04/29/exit-empire)

 
Image above: Knotted highway computer illustration. From Hock on the Behance Network (http://guymcpherson.com/2010/06/the-agenda-revisited).
 

If it’s conviction you’re looking for, Guy Mcpherson has it in spades. Enervated by the brand of neasuea that only a smokestack or anoxic river could author, Mcpherson left full tenure at a top US university so that he might live in a place un-deafened by the drone of industry. Employed now only by his hands and the land upon which he resides, Mcpherson, in his writing, demonstrates the sort of fierce lucidity reserved to those who seek to preserve nuanced reverence for the homeland Earth. It was our pleasure to get ahold of the good professor and ask him a few questions.

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Q: Paul Erlich recently stated that “The scale of the human socio-economic-political complex system is so large that it seriously interferes with the biospheric complex system upon which it is wholly dependent; and cultural evolution has been too slow to deal effectively with the resulting crisis.” Do you see our apparent incapacity to effectively deal with (let alone gauge the immensity of) today's issues as being primarily the result of a crisis in consciousness?

I certainly agree about the crisis in consciousness. Baby boomers went back to the land coincident with America's Cultural Revolution. We resisted the dominant paradigm throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which got us out of Vietnam, brought us environmental legislation that was the envy of the world, and brought tremendous strides in human rights (e.g., it became legal for people of color to vote).

Then we threw it all away for a few dollars more. We allowed a third-rate Hollywood actor to convince us we needed economic growth more than we needed peace, justice, and environmental protection. There can be no doubt this paradigm shift represented a crisis of consciousness, and still does.

We're still firmly committed to economic growth. We have a two-party, one-ideology system of governance, and the ideology is one of economic growth at all costs. As oilman George W. Bush pointed out, we are addicted to oil (because, as the lifeblood of civilization, oil is requisite to economic growth).

In other words, as I stated in an essay about 18 months ago:

"Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels. Then we ratcheted up the madness to rely on businesses that use, almost exclusively, a warehouse-on-wheels approach to just-in-time delivery of unnecessary devices designed for rapid obsolescence and disposal."

Q: Primary economic systems not only serve to guide national income and output but also, by proxy, act as the principal regulators of environmental quality. Put otherwise, capital is as equally embedded in the propulsion of material growth and self interest as it is in the geo-biological functioning of the planet- two domains that are fundamentally maladapted to one another. You mentioned that recognizing the industrial economy as such has forced you "to cross a threshold of denial most people find far too formidable to attempt." Could you briefly comment on your exodus from empire (the fortitude required), as well as on the degree to which industrial capitalism endangers the planet?

The fortitude required to leave a high-pay, low-work tenured position as full professor was substantial. Not only did I lose income and colleagues, but I lost my platform and, for all practical purposes, my identity. In this culture, we are quite attached to our work, especially when the work is viewed as prestigious.

But I could no longer plug my ears. The screams of non-industrial people and non-human species overwhelmed me. As I wrote in March 2010:

"Working at a major research university required me to live in a in a city, the very apex of empire. For years, I avoided the nagging voice in my head as it pointed out the horrific costs of imperial living: destruction of the living planet, obedience at home, and oppression abroad. Eventually, though, I could no longer ignore the powerful words of Arundhati Roy in her insightful 2001 book, Power Politics: 'The trouble is that once you see it, you can't unsee it. And once you've seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There's no innocence. Either way, you're accountable.'"

A line I wrote in December 2009 also is relevant:

"There can be little doubt that a system that enslaves, tortures, and kills people is wrong. Industrial culture does all that with stunning efficiency. Big Energy poisons our water. Big Ag controls our seeds, hence our food. Big Pharm controls, through pharmaceuticals, the behavior of our children. Wall Street controls the flow of money. Big Ad controls the messages you receive every day. The criminally rich get richer through crime: that's how America works. Through it all, we think we're free."

The moral imperative drove me away when I could no longer ignore it. The grand experiment in off-grid living, devoid of money, might fail. I might die younger than expected. But living in Tucson, working within a failed and immoral system, was killing me from the inside.

Q: Could you comment on the role of emergent popular discourses on the environment such as “green capitalism,” “sustainable development” and “ecological economics?” Though each is different in character and always subject to a variety of uses, do you think that these movements, in general, are adequate to the tasks they set out to solve?

These movements are not only insufficient, they are counter-productive efforts at green-washing. Any and all efforts to maintain the industrial economy ultimately lead to the same place: destruction of the living planet on which we depend for our lives.

The many efforts to keep sustaining the unsustainable industrial economy merely allow us to venture further into human-population overshoot while further degrading the lands and waters of the Earth. In other words, they delay human suffering, thereby leading to an increased number of humans who will suffer, and suffer more, in the future. The sooner we terminate the industrial economy that is making us crazy and killing us, the sooner we will live close to our neighbors and close to planet that sustains us. I'm in favor of a rapid trip, rather than the ongoing, planet-crushing, demoralizing decline in the industrial economy.

Q: What, in your opinion, are the most effective modes available through which to express a need for change within the current political and economic regimes? If traditional models of education, politics and economic theories are not serving the urgency of the crises at hand, what action do you advise concerned peoples to take?

I don't believe people will voluntarily move to a more sustainable set of living arrangements. We appear to be hard-wired for growth of the industrial economy. If so, there is no effective combination of mainstream approaches.

Shall we despair? I think not. To use a line from the iconoclastic Tucson-based writer Edward Abbey, I think we should instead employ action as an antidote to despair.

First and foremost, we should abandon the industrial economy to every possible extent. Then we should try to destroy it, because merely walking away is analogous to walking away from the screams as people use baseball bats to slaughter unarmed children. Walking away from such a scene does not address the issue, and it makes one a coward.

The industrial economy is destroying every aspect of the living planet on which we depend for our survival. In addition, the industrial economy is reducing the habitability of the planet for future generations. At this point, it may have tripped an extinction event for humans, although I believe we must act as if it is not too late to save our species. Doing so becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

Q: Uncertainties of measurement and misleading methodological approaches characterize current economic attempts to manage the world system. Such a measurement/theory mismatch creates uncertainty and error in understanding what is occurring in the present state of economic-ecological affairs. As a result of these poor methodologies, modern bureaucracies have created a routine of socioeconomic functioning that is notable for its lack of applicability to social & environmental reality. How can we characterize and develop change that ensures the development of a truly sustainable world system? How can we, as academics, activists, and concerned citizens, best intervene in the destructive logic of our current economic system?

We need to terminate the current economic system and the entire set of living arrangements contributing to, and resulting from it. The most durable set of living arrangements for humans is the one we employed for the first two million years of the human experience: living tribally as hunter-gatherers. A few thousand years ago, the first civilizations largely replaced this model and allowed human-population overshoot. Subsequently, every civilization has fallen. The current one is not exceptional in this regard. The only pertinent question, it seems to me: Will we destroy habitat for humans on Earth before this civilization completes its fall?

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Starting Over 2/19/11

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