If the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist perspective is right, and all nonhumans on the planet (and the planet itself) are just objects to be used, that means we, just like the indigenous, will never be able to summon help from others, be they Kamchatka brown bears, deadly viruses, oceans, fungi, forests, muses, fates, demons, angels, spirits, or ancestors. None of these exist. We can ask, but no one will hear us, and certainly no one will respond. We are, as this culture tells us in so many ways, all alone.

If we are all alone, and we care about the planet, our actions become clear: we must do everything necessary to decisively and finally bring down civilization before it kills any more of the planet. Because if the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist perspective is true, this culture will continue its routine and necessary destructiveness until it collapses or is stopped. The only real responses the civilized have to this destructiveness are the same ones they always have: primarily to call on everyone to rely on the generosity, graciousness, and skill of the civilized (and to kill or otherwise severely punish those who do not heed this call). The modern name for this generosity, graciousness, and skill regarding the natural world (and the most overtly exploited humans) is “sustainable development.” But of course “sustainable development” will for many reasons fail to materially help the natural world (and the most overtly exploited humans). It is an oxymoron, since “development” is a euphemism in this case for industrialization, which is by definition unsustainable; in fact, industrialization is utterly, irrevocably, and functionally antithetical to sustainability. This absurdly obvious oxymoron remains in common usage primarily for three reasons: (1) pushing this particular lie well serves those in power; (2) a lot of people are too busy, too emotionally drained and defeated, too fearful, too fully metabolized into the system, too incapable of thinking for themselves, too financially well-rewarded by the system, too dishonest, too greedy, too insane, too defensive of and about this culture, and/or too stupid to see the phrase for what it so obviously is (and of course different people can have multiple reasons for their inability to perceive the absurdity of “sustainable development”; George W. Bush, for example, would fall into at least ten of the above categories; and President Barack Obama would fall into at least nine); and (3) “sustainable development” is nothing more nor less than the twenty-first century version of the white man’s burden.

In Rudyard Kipling’s late-nineteenth-century poem “The White Man’s Burden,” he attempted to show just how damn difficult it is to be a white man in a world where you are constantly—and with great reluctance and heavy sighs—having to civilize benighted savages. This is a profound obligation carried by white men. How did these savages somehow survive on their own—lazy and wasteful as they are—for tens of thousands of years? Left unsaid in Kipling’s poem—as is often left unsaid in public discourse about these topics—is any inconvenient discussion of genocide, ecocide, enslavement, or mass organized theft of resources. Left unsaid is that the point of empire is to conquer, subdue, enslave, steal, and murder. Of course.

Fast forward a hundred or so years, and it’s still damn difficult to be a white man in a world where you are now constantly—and with great reluctance and heavy sighs—having to civilize (I mean, develop) benighted savages (I mean, underdeveloped nations). Only now the burden is even heavier, since these white men must now attempt to fulfill their obligations to rule over the entire planet, to “sustainably” manage forests and oceans (how did these forests and oceans ever survive for millions of years without scientific management?), to be “good stewards” of land and air and water that can all evidently fare no better without our assistance than could the savages of a hundred years ago, that need our help just to survive. Now left unsaid in all this talk of “sustainable development”—as is often left unsaid in public discourse about these topics—is any inconvenient discussion of genocide, ecocide, enslavement, or mass organized theft of resources. Left unsaid is that the point of empire—the point of industrial civilization, the point of civilization—is still to conquer, subdue, enslave, steal, and murder. Of course.

If the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist worldview is right, and we really are all alone in a universe bereft of nonhuman intelligences or beings, but if we for some strange reason care about the continuation of life on this planet (if perhaps we are not terminally narcissistic and psychopathic), we’re still where we started. We either need to fight by ourselves or find allies to fight alongside us. But if the allies aren’t there, we better roll up our sleeves and get to fighting.