Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

Let the Forests Come Back (p. 316)

From chapter "“Rebooting the World,” or The Destruction of All That Is"

Early on, the article lays out what’s going on, “With the Earth warming at a rate 10 times faster than the heat-up after the last ice age, scientists are looking at anything they can use to stop climate change.”

The problem is that when someone in this culture says they’re looking at “anything they can use to stop climate change,” they really mean looking at “anything they can use” except the sense God gave a goose, and then using that God- or evolution- or nature-given sense to question authoritarian technics, to question human supremacism. That is, they really mean they’re looking at everything except the things that matter most.

You could—and frankly, a lot of human supremacists do—argue that questioning authoritarian technics—which means questioning everything civilization is based on, including agriculture, including human supremacism—is insane and monstrous.

I think that when what is at stake is life on this planet, and when it’s plain to see that from the beginning this way of life has been functionally destructive, that not questioning this way of life is what is insane and monstrous. What’s insane and monstrous is preferring this way of life over life on earth.

So, in the article, what is meant by scientists “looking at anything they can use to stop climate change”?

Well, some of the options actually make sense. The author states, “It’s not crazy to think humans could come up with ways to change the makeup of the planet; after all, humans have already reengineered the earth by accident [sic]. Across the planet we’ve torn down carbon-capturing forests to make room for farms, so we could feed our growing populations. And David Edwards, a professor of conservation science at the University of Sheffield, is starting to think that one of the best ways to geoengineer the planet is to figure out a way to bring those forests back.”

Actually, it’s really easy to bring the forests back: stop destroying them and let them come back. It’s what they want to do, and it’s what they do best.

But stopping deforestation and encouraging reforestation becomes a problem when you’re living in a culture with an extractive economy. When your economy requires and rewards deforestation, and you don’t want to destroy your economy—if, in fact, you can’t even question your economy—then it becomes necessary for you to try to “figure out a way to bring those forests back.” It also becomes, on the largest scale, impossible, for the reasons I laid out earlier; this is all just the environmental version of the anti-empire activists who still want the goodies of empire. These people still want the goodies that come with an economy based on drawdown, and hope to find a way to get them without, well, drawdown. It’s impossible to have overshoot without having the effects of overshoot.