7/7/14

AFF

Searches
Wesley J Smith
Julian Simon
Climate defeatist
Neo-Luddism

Aff Cards
Kingsnorth is wrong, the alternative is unrestrained violence,
collapse of modern civilization will lead to all-out war and
oppression, not the world singing kumbaya empirics prove
Gray, Chief book analyst, 2009
[John, 10/09/09, The New Statesman, Uncivilisation: the Dark Mountain
Manifesto, http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/09/civilisation-planetauthors, 7/7/14, MMV]

The Dark Mountain Manifesto begins with the observation that this
appearance of stability is delusive. "The pattern of ordinary life, in which so
much stays the same from one day to the next," the authors write, "disguises the
fragility of its fabric." Written by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, this slim
pamphlet aims to demolish contemporary beliefs about progress,
industrialism and the place of human beings on the planet, and up to a point
it succeeds. Much in contemporary thought is made up of myths masquerading as
facts, and it is refreshing to see these myths clearly identified as such. The authors
are right that none is more powerful than the idea that we are separate from the
natural world, and free to use it as we see fit.
But is it true that civilisation is also a myth, as Kingsnorth and Hine claim?
Would human beings - or the planet that they are ravaging - be better off if
civilisation collapsed? The authors tell us that our present way of life "is built
upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our
manifest destiny as a chosen species".
These legends, they continue, have "led the planet into the age of
ecocide". The spread of civilisation and the destruction of the biosphere have gone
together. The human future, it seems to the authors, must lie in
"uncivilisation".
Kingsnorth and Hine seem to present uncivilisation as chiefly a project for
writers and artists. They do not appear to be fixed on tackling
environmental crisis with new policies or any kind of political action. A
change of sensibility is what they are after, and it is interesting to note the writers
they pick out as exemplars of this new view of things.
One is Robinson Jeffers, the once-celebrated and now much-underrated
Californian eco-poet from one of whose verses the Dark Mountain project
takes its name. Others include Wendell Berry, W S Merwin and Cormac McCarthy.
Joseph Conrad is mentioned more than once, and cited approvingly for his
view (summarised by his friend Bertrand Russell) that civilised life is "a
dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might
break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths".
It is intriguing to see which writers do and do not make it on to the
authors' list. J G Ballard, whose entire work can be seen as an exploration
of the flimsiness of civilised existence, is left out, while Conrad's inclusion
shows only that the authors have seriously misunderstood him. In a
passage quoted in the pamphlet, Conrad writes: "Few men realise that their life, the

very essence of their character, their capabilities and audacities, are only the
expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings."
For Conrad, the safety of civilised life was always partly illusory, if only
because "civilisation" itself is never more than partial; the heart of
darkness was as much in London as in the Congo. But even though civilisation
is indelibly flawed, that does not mean it deserves to be destroyed; on the
contrary, Conrad was convinced civilisation must be defended with
unyielding determination. In reality, the alternative - a raw version of which he
witnessed in King Leopold's private fiefdom in the Belgian Congo - is madness and
unrestrained violence, a state that can reasonably be described as
barbarism.
The authors' misreading of Conrad provides a clue to their reasons for
excluding Ballard from their list of kindred spirits. Ballard's early life in a
Shanghai internment camp taught him that the disintegration of society does not
produce any better version of the human animal. It may lead to a kind of personal
liberation - at least if you are an adolescent boy, as Ballard was when he was
interned - but overall the result of social collapse is to give free rein to the most
psychopathic and predatory among us.
The notion that social breakdown could be the prelude to a better world is
a Romantic dream that history has proved wrong time and again. China
and Russia have suffered complete social breakdown on several occasions
during their history, as did much of Europe in the period between the two
world wars. The result has never been the stable anarchy that is
sometimes envisioned in the poetry of Jeffers. Instead, it is the thugs and
fanatics who promise to restore order that triumph, whether Lenin and
Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, or Hitler and assorted petty dictators in
Europe. It is the old Hobbesian doctrine - one that has never been
successfully superseded.
The authors do not tell us what they expect to happen after civilisation has
disappeared, but it may be something like the post-apocalyptic, neo-medieval world
imagined by the nature mystic Richard Jefferies in his novel After London, or Wild
England (1885). In it, Britain is depopulated after ecological disaster and reverts to
barbarism; but it is not long before a new social order springs up, simpler and
happier than the one that has passed away. After London is an Arcadian morality
tale that even Jefferies probably did not imagine could ever come to pass.
Over a century later, the belief that a global collapse could lead to a better
world is ever more far-fetched. Human numbers have multiplied,
industrialisation has spread worldwide and the technologies of war are far
more highly developed. In these circumstances, ecological catastrophe will
not trigger a return to a more sustainable way of life, but will intensify the
existing competition among nation states for the planet's remaining
reserves of oil, gas, fresh water and arable land. Waged with hi-tech
weapons, the resulting war could destroy not only large numbers of
human beings but also much of what is left of the biosphere.
A scenario of this kind is not remotely apocalyptic. It is no more than
history as usual, together with new technologies and ongoing climate
change. The notion that the conflicts of history have been left behind is truly
apocalyptic, and Kingsnorth and Hine are right to target business-as-usual
philosophies of progress. When they posit a cleansing catastrophe,
however, they, too, succumb to apocalyptic thinking. How can anyone

imagine that the dream-driven human animal will suddenly become sane
when its environment starts disintegrating? In their own catastrophist fashion,
the authors have swallowed the progressive fairy tale that animates the
civilisation they reject.
A change of sensibility in the arts would be highly desirable. The new
perspective that is needed, however, is the opposite of apocalyptic. Neither
Conrad nor Ballard believed that catastrophe could alter the terms on which human
beings live in the world. Both writers were unsparing critics of civilisation,
but they never imagined there was a superior alternative. Each had
witnessed for himself what the alternative means in practice.
Rightly, Kingsnorth and Hine insist that our present environmental
difficulties are not solvable problems, but are inseparable from our current
way of living. When confronted with problems that are insoluble, however, the
most useful response is not to await disaster in the hope that the
difficulties will magically disappear. It is to do whatever can be done,
knowing that it will not amount to much. Stoical acceptance of this kind is
practically unthinkable at present - an age when emotional self-expression is
valued more than anything else. Still, stoicism will be needed if civilised life is to
survive an environmental crisis that cannot now be avoided. Walking on lava
requires a cool head, not one filled with fiery dreams.

Perm do both the alt is too radical, we can and should accept
engineering and the solutions it provides will also rejecting
perpetual growth
Monbiot, Author and Journalist, 2010
[George, 5/10/10, The Guardian, I share their despair, but I'm not quite
ready to climb the Dark
Mountain,http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifgreen/2010/may/10/deepwater-horizon-greens-collapse-civilisation, 7/7/14,
MMV]

Today's greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the
planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with
new ones wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines that wreck even more of the
world's wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the
problem to an engineering challenge. They've forgotten that they are
supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save
industrial civilisation.
That task, Paul Kingsnorth a co-founder of Dark Mountain believes, is
futile: "The civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is
too late to stop it." Nor can we bargain with it, as "the economic system we rely
upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon growth in order to
function". Instead of trying to reduce the impacts of our civilisation, we should "start
thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from
its collapse Our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, whilst
creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place".
Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I champion,
I recognise the truth in it. Something has been lost along the way. Among the
charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search for green solutions that

can work politically and economically, we have tended to forget the love of nature
that drew us into all this.
But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem
with its vision is that industrial civilisation is much more resilient than it
proposes. In the opening essay of the movement's first book, to be published this
week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005,
that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.
While I'm prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next
few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as
the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that
will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that
underground coal gasification injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the
hydrogen and methane they release can boost the UK's land-based coal reserves
70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped
reserves of other fossil fuels bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates that energy
companies will turn to if the price is right.
Like all cultures, industrial civilisation will collapse at some point.
Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don't
believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the
next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn't reduce its
reliance on primary resources, our civilisation will tank the biosphere
before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain
people believe will be civilisation's imminent collapse, without trying to
change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything
greens are supposed to value.
Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies.
There is a world of difference between the impact of wind farms and the
impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view
but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet's every pore.
And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of
industrial civilisation health, education, sanitation, nutrition the field will be
left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don't give a stuff
about the impacts.
We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can
embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put.
We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This
approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than
the alternatives.

7/8/14
Civilization is great it has made more progress than we could
ever have imagined, it can provide solutions to the coming
catastrophe
Agarwal, Journalist, 2012
[Rohit, 2012, Preserve Articles, Essay on Modern Civilization,
http://www.preservearticles.com/201104155446/modern-civilizationessay.html, 7/8/14, MMV]

We believe that we live in a wonderful era, an era of all round progress. We

think that we have excelled and surpassed our forefathers in almost every
respect. The twentieth century seems to us a glorious age and we pride
ourselves on its achievements.
No doubt, there is justification for this satisfaction and complacency. The
science has made tremendous progress. The use of machine in industry has
eliminated human labour.
Electricity is serving us in thousand ways. Railways, ships and aeroplanes
have annihilated distance and made travel fast and comfortable. The
telephone and the telegraph have made communication swift and easy. The cinema,
the radio and television have added a new charm to life. Medicine and surgery
have made immense strides.
Atomic energy has brought in numerous benefits upon mankind. The
wonders and miracles of science would justify us in paying a tribute to
modern civilization.
Apart from scientific progress that makes our civilization so great,
politically also much has been achieved. Countries under foreign
domination have been liberated. Our age has seen many countries under
foreign domination being liberated.
In the social sphere, our progress is no less marked; outdated customs are
vanishing; the standard of living of people is rising. The working class is
getting better wages and more facilities. The world percentage of literacy
has greatly risen.
Besides, we have achieved a higher level of culture than was reached by
our ancestors. We live in a truly enlightened age. There is greater refinement
than ever before. People have become polished in their manners and behaviour.
There is a widespread appreciation of art and literature; a keen interest is
evinced in books, periodicals, paintings, music, dancing, exhibitions and
the like.

Kingsnorth is wrong hope and perseverance is key to survive

the collapse, empirics prove
Hertsgaard, Environmental Author, 2012
[Mark, 4/25/12, Thoreau Farm, Climate and the Politics of Hope,
http://thoreaufarm.org/2012/04/climate-and-the-politics-of-hope/, 7/8/14,
MMV]

WS: So, is someone like Paul Kingsnorth who says its time to face the fact
that the situation is hopeless essentially right?
HERTSGAARD: The angst of a guy like Kingsnorth, its very understandable
Ive faced those kinds of questions, personally, and worked through them, not
just in writing Hot, but writing Earth Odyssey, before that but I didnt think
that he had a very good grasp of politics, or history, beyond the ecological
sphere.
I mean, I look at someone like Vaclav Havel who was the one who really
taught me this lesson, when I interviewed him for Earth Odyssey and the
politics of hope. Hope is not some silly, light-hearted feeling that you
maintain just to keep going. Hope is an active verb. It is a political choice.
It led Havel to go to jail, under a system that had no appearance of falling. He went
into jail in 1979 and served four years in solitary confinement, against the advice of
his pal and fellow litterateur Milan Kundera, who said: Dont do this, we need you on
the outside. And Havels answer to that was: You know what, we never quite know
what taking a certain political action will lead to, and when we try to think too far in
advance, we end up not taking actions. And the important thing is to take actions,
and to believe in the politics of hope. Even in the face of apparent impossibility.
And as Havel himself pointed out, in our interview, Nelson Mandela makes this
point in spades. He went to jail in 1962 1962! when there was no
appearance that apartheid would ever fall. But he did it, because he
believed in doing the right thing, and letting the chips fall where they
may. Again, not in a self-sacrificing or foolish way. He really believed that this
was what eventually was going to lead to victory. He could have been
wrong. Havel could have been wrong. They both recognized that and they did it
anyway. Thats the point.
And Mr. Kingsnorth, I understand why he looks at the situation in despair.
Anybody who looked at apartheid in 1962 would have despaired that it
would ever change. But thats not an excuse to give up. Especially for me,
personally as a parent, I dont care if the odds are 10,000 to 1. If its that
one that could give my daughter and of course others, but especially the single
most important person in the world to me I mean, I would throw myself in front of
a train for her, why wouldnt I devote my life to doing whatever is necessary to give
her that chance? So, if were going to have a real, honest conversation about
this, guess what? Its scary. It looks dark. But so did apartheid in 1962. So
did opposing totalitarianism of the Soviet Union in 1979. And guess what,
it changed.
It is quite arrogant to think that we know how history will work out
especially given that it is we who make history.