Civilization is only one of the many human cultures that have existed on Earth and it is certainly not the oldest, but its destructiveness is without parallel. It is characterized by plowing the soil, dependence on growing annual grain and legume crops in extremely labor intensive ways, locking up the food surpluses thereby produced, and forcing its members to work for access to food stores. It is also characterized by the beliefs, enshrined in all its major religious traditions and virtually unquestioned by its members, that this is the one right way to live and that the world was made to be conquered by (civilized) humans.
Before civilization emerged roughly ten thousand years ago the region now known as Iraq was covered in dense cedar forest. The Arabian Peninsula was mostly grassland. These and many other regions have become deserts under the combined assaults of deforestation, plow-based agriculture and overgrazing of domesticated livestock.
In the past thousand years alone, 2 billion hectares (nearly 5 billion acres) of arable land have been turned into wasteland.[1] This is an area equal to more than one third of the continental United States. At current rates of topsoil destruction there is a global average of about 60 harvests remaining.[2]
This unsustainable culture has destroyed countless sustainable cultures that did not exploit the land they lived on or lock up their food supplies. The conquests have often been carried out through genocide. They continue to be carried out through genocide, both physical and cultural. Elaborate lies have been constructed to cover up these crimes. The few truly sustainable cultures that remain have been pushed to the margins of this planet—into hot deserts, into the far northern Arctic, into remote parts of large tropical jungles. An enormous amount of refined ancient knowledge of how to live in harmony with the planet has been obliterated.
The culture of maximum harm continues to decimate forests, which were thriving on land for 370 million years. A recent estimate says that the global number of trees has declined by 46 percent since the beginning of civilization.[3]
Rivers around the world have been dammed, enslaved to generate electricity or to provide water for destructive agriculture or to stop natural floods, preventing fish from migrating upstream where they want to spawn and die, giving their bodies to the soil. Many species of anadromous fish who survived catastrophic events like massive river-boiling volcanic eruptions and sudden bursting of natural ice dams are now pushed to the brink of extinction by the millions of concrete dams which civilization has built.
So relentlessly has civilization been growing at the expense of the rest of the world that the current rate of species extinction is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural background rate.[4] How long can this continue? Nobody is sure, but there is a real possibility that half of all living species will be facing extinction by the end of this century.[5]
The culture of maximum harm is devastating life in the oceans. More than half of the world’s ocean area is now subject to industrial fishing operations.[6] Rapid depletion of fish stocks and severe marine pollution are the norm worldwide.[7]
Global climate patterns are being disrupted by the vast amount of fossil fuels burned by industrial civilization as well as the carbon lost from abused soils. Virtually all life on Earth is being plunged into uncharted territory by rapidly forced changes to the atmosphere and oceans.
The culture of maximum harm worships destruction and unstable balances of terror to the point of not only manufacturing, testing and even using nuclear weapons, but also rationalizing their continued existence. Specific groups of powerful people now possess the ability to kill hundreds of millions of people across the globe within hours. Even if a nuclear war never breaks out (and there have been many close calls[8]), the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed by numerous test explosions have scattered highly water soluble cesium-137 all over the planet.
Worst of all, the culture of maximum harm has, as a matter of tradition, perpetuated family structures and larger social systems in which countless children are beaten, raped, neglected, and traumatized in too many other ways to list. They are brainwashed into accepting abusive paternalistic control, into locking up the food and exploiting the land, and to believe human existence must be like this. The global plunder of forests, the poisoning of rivers and oceans, the extermination of species and destruction of the soil itself—all these suicidal atrocities could only be committed by a culture in which it is normal to murder children’s souls and to vomit one’s buried nightmares onto the world.
The culture of maximum harm must be stopped in order to protect the living world to which we all belong. It will not be enough to sabotage its oil refineries, or to kill its most delusional and powerful members, or to sink its industrial fishing fleets. Actions such as these may slow down the destruction but they will not strike at the root of the problem. Civilization is driven to murder the living world and immiserate its surviving inhabitants by the compulsion to act out unspeakable childhood traumas.
Those of us who have emerged from our childhoods holding on to a viable connection with our core selves, who therefore possess the emotional and intellectual capacities to grasp what is happening on this planet, have a responsibility to break through our remaining denial and grieve our traumas so that we are able to speak out with full passion about the unspeakable. We must do everything in our power to wake up a culture collectively lost in acting out its traumatic nightmares before it sleepwalks into catastrophe and brings down most of the living world with it.
The hour is late, but there is still time. And there is hope: members of civilization would not be acting out as they do if not for a deeply repressed need to make their pain visible to themselves and others.
[1] United Nations Environment Program, “Farming Systems Principles for Improved Food Production and the Control of Soil Degradation in the Arid, Semi-Arid, and Humid Tropics,” proceedings of an expert meeting cosponsored by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Hyderabad, India, 1986
[2] “Only 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues”; Scientific American; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/
[3] “Mapping tree density at a global scale”; Nature; https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14967
[4] “Estimating the normal background rate of species extinction”; Conservation Biology; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cobi.12380
[5] “Biologists think 50% of species will be facing extinction by the end of the century”; The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/25/half-all-species-extinct-end-century-vatican-conference
[6] “Tracking the global footprint of fisheries”; Science; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6378/904
[7] “Fisheries: Hope or despair?”; Marine Pollution Bulletin; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025326X13003044
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls
Beyond the Family Cult 