#deep ecology

[milkweed-mustelid]

Hello hi I think the alterhuman community needs to be more radically environmentalist! I think all alterhumans should look into environmentalism and stuff like Solarpunk. It’s something I wish I saw more discussion of in the community. Many [ though not all ] of us claim relation and connection to our Earth and the environment. I DONT know why we as a community are not more radically environmentalist.

I’d unironically be happy to share resources abt this kinda stuff to anyone interested

[elain-has-a-knife]

[galerymod]

🐝 So, You Better Pick Up That Paintbrush, Or Pray The AI Robots Can Fly: The Day Bees Disappeared From The Equation Of Nature

Let’s stop scrolling past the eco-anxiety headlines for five minutes and look at cold, hard, unyielding system dynamics. We like to imagine that human technological evolution is building a bridge to the future. In reality, we are using hyper-advanced tech to build a life-support system for a planet we are actively killing.

Nowhere is this more terrifyingly obvious than in the collapse of our global bee populations—both managed honeybees and specialized wild bees.

Grab a coffee. This is the complete, unabridged, scientifically cross-examined autopsy of how humanity is removing the primary biological catalyst of the terrestrial biosphere, what the real numbers say, and why our technocratic replacements are a hilariously expensive joke.

📉 Part 1: The Empirical Receipts (Tracking the Collapse)

In 1972, the MIT’s World3 computer model warned the Club of Rome that infinite material growth on a finite planet would lead to a systemic collapse by the mid-21st century. Today, data scientists (like Gaia Herrington) have confirmed we are tracking the "Business as Usual" (BAU2) scenario with terrifying accuracy.

Right now, the Stockholm Resilience Centre proves we have breached 6 out of 9 Planetary Boundaries. We are in "Overshoot," burning 1.7 Earths per year.

And the bees are caught in the crossfire of three distinct, compounding system-shocks:

🦠 The Parasite Pressure: Varroa destructor mites act as biological vectors, sucking bee hemolymph (blood) and transmitting deadly deformed wing viruses.

🧪 The Chemical Inversion: Neonicotinoids and widespread pesticides don't just kill bees instantly; they decimate their central nervous systems. Bees lose their navigation, forget how to return to the hive, and the colony starves in isolation.

🏜️ The Habitat Monotony: Global agriculture has created massive "Green Deserts" (Monocultures). Millions of hectares of single crops (like rape or corn) provide a brief, explosive overabundance of food for two weeks, followed by an absolute nutritional vacuum from June to autumn. Combine this with the urban craze of Schottergärten (gravel gardens) and asphalt sealing, and you have effectively locked wild bees out of their physical nesting grounds (considering over 70% of wild bees nest directly in the soil).

When space runs out, the hive triggers its genetic emergency protocol: Swarming. The old queen takes 30,000 bees and leaves in a massive cloud to find a new home, naturally regulating population density. In modern industrial agriculture, this natural urge is systematically crushed by beekeepers forcing ever more boxes onto the hive to maximize pollination armies.

🃏 Part 4: The Pathetic Attempt to Activate Bumblebees as "Backup Slaves"

As honeybees die off, industrial greenhouses (especially in the Netherlands and Spain) have turned to a helpless alternative: commercializing bumblebees. It is a masterclass in treating the symptom while ignoring the systemic disease.

The Scale Inversion: A honeybee colony sends out tens of thousands of workers. A bumblebee colony is tiny—peaking at just 100 to 400 individuals. Trying to scale bumblebees to replace honeybees across open agricultural fields is logistically and financially impossible.

The "Disposable Material" Model: Bumblebees possess a superpower called Buzz Pollination (Vibrational Pollination). They grab a flower and vibrate their flight muscles to explosively release pollen—something honeybees can't do. The agricultural industry exploits this by ordering mass-produced bumblebee nests packed in cardboard boxes via mail delivery. They are dropped into closed greenhouses, worked to death under extreme heat and single-crop stress, and when the colony collapses after a few weeks, they are tossed into the trash and replaced.

The Peak of Legal Absurdity: The collapse of wild bumblebees in California led to one of the most surreal legal battles of our time. Because the California Endangered Species Act explicitly protected birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and fish—but completely forgot to include insects—environmentalists spent years in court. In a historic, dystopian ruling, a California court legally declared that bumblebees are "fish" so they could finally qualify for environmental protection against the pesticide lobbies.

👁️ The Final Verdict: The Illusion of Arrogance

The historical pathology that humans are the "pinnacle of creation" (Krone der Schöpfung) and that nature is just a storage locker for capitalist extraction has reached its logical endpoint. We have internalized an economic system based on Externalities—where a chemical company can profit from a bee-killing poison while the biosphere pays the tab.

The examples of Maoxian and California show us that technology doesn't liberate us from nature. It turns us into its janitors. If we keep going down this path, our future isn't a high-tech utopia; it's a desperate, exhausting existence where we are forced to manually mimic the very biology we were too arrogant to protect.

If we continue to mistake the destruction of our biological life-support systems for technological progress, the human race will spend its final, wealthiest century manually painting plastic flowers in a dead world.

mod

1. System Dynamics & The Club of Rome

Dixson-Declève, S., Gaffney, O., Ghosh, J., Randers, J., Rockström, J. and Stoknes, P.E. 2022. Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity. 1st edn. London: New Society Publishers.

Herrington, G. 2021. 'Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data', Journal of Industrial Ecology, 25(3), pp. 614–626.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens, W.W. 1972. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: New York University Press.

2. Earth System Science & Planetary Boundaries

Bardi, U. 2021. The Seneca Effect: Why Growth is Much Slower than Collapse. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Rockström, J. and Steffen, W. et al. 2023. 'Earth beyond planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet', Science, 347(6223), p. 1259855.

3. Ecology, Bee Decline & The Bumblebee Trade

Goulson, D. 2021. Silent Earth: Saving Our Insects. London: Vintage Books.

Imdorf, A., Buehlmann, G., Gerig, L., Kilchenmann, V. and Wille, H. 1987. 'Validation of the Liebefeld method for estimating the brood area and bee population in a colony', Apidologie, 18(2), pp. 137–146.

Velthuis, H.H. and van Doorn, A. 2006. 'A century of advances in bumblebee domestication and their commerce', Apidologie, 37(4), pp. 421–451.

4. Real-World Case Studies (China, California & Legal Rulings)

California Court of Appeal 2022. Almond Alliance of California v. Fish and Game Commission. Third Appellate District, C093542.

Partap, U. and Tang, Y. 2012. The Maoxian Case Study: Human pollination of apple and pear orchards in Sichuan, China. Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).

Sumner, D.A. and Matthews, W.A. 2018. The Economic Importance of Almond Pollination in California. Davis: University of California, Agricultural Issues Center.

5. Economic Philosophy & Technocratic Criticism

Asafu-Adjaye, J. et al. 2015. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Oakland: Breakthrough Institute.

Jevons, W.S. 1865. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Destruction of the Coal-fields. London: Macmillan and Co.

Nachtwey, O. 2018. Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe. London: Verso Books.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Existence Value: Why All of Nature is Important Whether We Can Use it or Not

I spend a lot of time around other nature nerds. We’re a bunch of people from varying backgrounds, places, and generations who all find a deep well of inspiration within the natural world. We’re the sort of people who will happily spend all day outside enjoying seeing wildlife and their habitats without any sort of secondary goal like fishing, foraging, etc. (though some of us engage in those activities, too.) We don’t just fall in love with the places we’ve been, either, but wild locales that we’ve only ever seen in pictures, or heard of from others. We are curators of existence value.

Existence value is exactly what it sounds like–something is considered important and worthwhile simply because it is. It’s at odds with how a lot of folks here in the United States view our “natural resources.” It’s also telling that that is the term most often used to refer collectively to anything that is not a human being, something we have created, or a species we have domesticated, and I have run into many people in my lifetime for whom the only value nature has is what money can be extracted from it. Timber, minerals, water, meat (wild and domestic), mushrooms, and more–for some, these are the sole reasons nature exists, especially if they can be sold for profit. When questioning how deeply imbalanced and harmful our extractive processes have become, I’ve often been told “Well, that’s just the way it is,” as if we shall be forever frozen in the mid-20th century with no opportunity to reimagine industry, technology, or uses thereof.

Moreover, we often assign positive or negative value to a being or place based on whether it directly benefits us or not. Look at how many people want to see deer and elk numbers skyrocket so that they have more to hunt, while advocating for going back to the days when people shot every gray wolf they came across. Barry Holstun Lopez’ classic Of Wolves and Men is just one of several in-depth looks at how deeply ingrained that hatred of the “big bad wolf” is in western mindsets, simply because wolves inconveniently prey on livestock and compete with us for dwindling areas of wild land and the wild game that sustained both species’ ancestors for many millennia. “Good” species are those that give us things; “bad” species are those that refuse to be so complacent.

Even the modern conservation movement often has to appeal to people’s selfishness in order to get us to care about nature. Look at how often we have to argue that a species of rare plant is worth saving because it might have a compound in it we could use for medicine. Think about how we’ve had to explain that we need biodiverse ecosystems, healthy soil, and clean water and air because of the ecosystem services they provide us. We measure the value of trees in dollars based on how they can mitigate air pollution and anthropogenic climate change. It’s frankly depressing how many people won’t understand a problem until we put things in terms of their own self-interest and make it personal. (I see that less as an individual failing, and more our society’s failure to teach empathy and emotional skills in general, but that’s a post for another time.)

Existence value flies in the face of all of those presumptions. It says that a wild animal, or a fungus, or a landscape, is worth preserving simply because it is there, and that is good enough. It argues that the white-tailed deer and the gray wolf are equally valuable regardless of what we think of them or get from them, in part because both are keystone species that have massive positive impacts on the ecosystems they are a part of, and their loss is ecologically devastating.

But even those species whose ecological impact isn’t quite so wide-ranging are still considered to have existence value. And we don’t have to have personally interacted with a place or its natural inhabitants in order to understand their existence value, either. I may never get to visit the Maasai Mara in Kenya, but I wish to see it as protected and cared for as places I visit regularly, like Willapa National Wildlife Refuge. And there are countless other places, whose names I may never know and which may be no larger than a fraction of an acre, that are important in their own right.

I would like more people (in western societies in particular) to be considering this concept of existence value. What happens when we detangle non-human nature from the automatic value judgements we place on it according to our own biases? When we question why we hold certain values, where those values came from, and the motivations of those who handed them to us in the first place, it makes it easier to see the complicated messes beneath the simple, shiny veneer of “Well, that’s just the way it is.”

And then we get to that most dangerous of realizations: it doesn’t have to be this way. It can be different, and better, taking the best of what we’ve accomplished over the years and creating better solutions for the worst of what we’ve done. In the words of Rebecca Buck–aka Tank Girl–“We can be wonderful. We can be magnificent. We can turn this shit around.”

Let’s be clear: rethinking is just the first step. We can’t just uproot ourselves from our current, deeply entrenched technological, social, and environmental situation and instantly create a new way of doing things. Societal change takes time; it takes generations. This is how we got into that situation, and it’s how we’re going to climb out of it and hopefully into something better. Sometimes the best we can do is celebrate small, incremental victories–but that’s better than nothing at all.

Nor can we just ignore the immensely disproportionate impact that has been made on indigenous and other disadvantaged communities by our society (even in some cases where we’ve actually been trying to fix the problems we’ve created.) It does no good to accept nature’s inherent value on its own terms if we do not also extend that acceptance throughout our own society, and to our entire species as a whole.

But I think ruminating on this concept of existence value is a good first step toward breaking ourselves out first and foremost. And then we go from there.

Did you enjoy this post? Consider taking one of my online foraging and natural history classes or hiring me for a guided nature tour, checking out my other articles, or picking up a paperback or ebook I’ve written! You can even buy me a coffee here!

[dailyanarchistposts]

In mid-August, a three year-old lawsuit charging that environmentalist groups were religious extremists comparable to some of the more violent, intolerant, ultra-orthodox Islamic sects collapsed when the attorney failed to meet a re-filing deadline with the U.S. Supreme Court.

The suit had been brought against the Forest Guardians, the Superior Wilderness Action Network, and the U.S. Forest Service by the 125 companies that make up the Associated Contract Loggers (A.C.L.) of northern Minnesota. The loggers were asking for $600,000 in damages and permission to plunder timber from the Superior National Forest.

Lawyers for the A.C.L. argued that deep ecology was actually a religion, and so by extension, environmental groups that espoused its philosophies were cults, and by outlawing timber cutting on so-called “federal land,” the Forest Service was favoring a particular set of religious doctrines and was therefore violating the guarantee of neutrality in matters of religion purportedly vouchsafed in the U.S. Constitution.

According to theological scholars at the logging company syndicate like former executive director, Larry Jones, Deep Ecology is an “earth-centered religion,” a “belief system” that holds that “trees and Man [sic] are equal.” Anti-logging activists who extol the virtues of forested spaces over industry profit and environmental degradation are spiritual zealots, and the government functionaries who are swayed by their proselytizing may turn out to be fanatical closet druids themselves.

Stephen Young, the A.C.L. lawyer and a former Republican Party senatorial candidate, explained his legal action on such esteemed venues as Rush Limbaugh’s radio show by saying that clear-cutting in national forests had been restricted by the Forest Service for no reason other than reverebce for some fringe New Age religion.

A U.S. District Court judge in Minnesota dismissed the case as “frivolous” in February 2000, but the A.C.L. petitioned the Supreme Court last year after reports that Wahabi Islamic extremists were responsible for the blitzkrieg attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

“The doctrine of Deep Ecology is the very worldview that gave rise to eco-terrorism. We feel that after the events of September 11, it’s an obligation of the Supreme Court to keep religious fanaticism in check,” Young said. “Just as devout faith in the literal words of various Hadith of Mohammad gave the Taliban license to impose through state power harsh conditions on the women of Afghanistan, so Deep Ecology gives license to its adherents to take extreme actions against those who would live by different beliefs.”

Perhaps the less said about this sleazy episode the better, which is just as well, since it is so hard to get a firm analytic grasp on it because it is sad and sick on so many different levels. For instance, likening the plight of women in Afghanistan to that of lumber barons in northern Minnesota is staggering in its shamelessness, as it has been my experience that women living near industrial logging camps are subjected to at least the same sort of abuse, derision, and masculinist domination as women who had been living in Taliban-controlled Kandahar.

And we all know that if the U.S. government was serious about keeping homicidal religious terrorism in check, then John Ashcroft and the Army of God anti-abortionists would be in the Guantanamo Bay gulag. It was all obviously just a miserable attempt to slander and jam up anti-logging activists with legal action, and it failed.

But I can’t help thinking about the broader philosophical implications of who supported it. I have no idea as to whether or not there are Deep Ecologists involved in Forest Guardians or the Superior Wilderness Action Network (and I suspect that none are to be found among the Forest Service feds), but in demonizing Deep Ecology as an alien fanatical religious practice in this lawsuit, we can see once again how tighly Christianity is bound to capitalist exploitation and ecological destruction.

Deep ecology is not a single doctrine, but rather an ethical sensibility informed by a variety of perspectives on the relationship of hummankind to the whole of nature’s systems. We can oversimplifydeep ecology by saying that its fundamentals include a belief in the intrinsic value of all forms of life as well as the holistic diversity of those life forms. The economic, technological, and ideological beliefs that prop up Western civilization antagonistically threaten the existence and diversity of natural life systems.

Individuals who adhere to the ideas of Deep Ecology are obligated to work towards radically changing those deadly attitudes and social structures. Deep ecology challenges the long-held anthropocentrist notion which entitles humans to take advantage of and destroy wilderness at will and for private profit, a view obviously held sacred by the A.C.L. timber industrialists.

Anthropocentrism derives from core Judeo-Christian values that have been part of the settler-capitalist catechism on this continent since the early seventeenth-century. Consider, for example, the preaching of Puritan minister, John Cotton. In his popular pamphlet of the 1630’s, “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” Cotton claimed that God desired colonists to “take possesion” of land in New England, saying that whosoever “bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it” has an inviolable divine right to it.

The Native Americans, dying in large numbers from exposure to European diseases was proff that God wanted to wipe the slate clean for the Puritans and thereby better facilitate His decree in the Book of Genesis that humans aggresively “subdue” the earth. Christians were the center of the universe, exclusively licensed by Almighty God to dominate the land, eradicate wild nature, and replace it with the purity of civilization. “All the world out of the Church is as wilderness, or at best, a wild field where all manner of unclean and wild beasts live and feed,” Cotton proclaimed in 1642.

There were many others during the period who were at least as enthusiastic about Christ, colonization, and commercial cultivation as Cotton was, and these ideas, linked to distinctly Judeo-Christian models of linear (rather than seasonally cyclical) time, became ingrained in the settler psyche, especially during the era of westward expansion some two centuries later. Justified by the Calvinist capitalism of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations — complete with its fallacious notions about the ennobling “civilizing” powers of wealth, marlets, and economic growth — the implications of Puritan repugnance for the wilderness and wildness on the North American continent becomes depressingly clear.

As inheritors of Puritan fanaticism that have erected the violent, intolerant faith of capitalism, it is individuals and organizations like the A.C.L. who hold a worldview that advances a five hundred year-old campaign of terrorism against entire bioregions and “empowers its adherents to take extreme action against those who would live by different beliefs.”

[the-animal-tern]

At a time when Western science is revealing an increasing number of aspects of commonality between humans and animals, we nevertheless tend to define ourselves as distinctly non-animal. Our humanness traditionally stands out as a negation of animal features. According to Keith Thomas the official concept of the animal in early modern England was negative, helping to define, by contrast, what was admirable about humanity. Animals embodied the antithesis of all that was valued and esteemed. It seems that modern Western society more than any other emphasizes the 'Otherness' of the non-human. By drawing a sharp dividing line between human and non-human, a vast gap is created between the subject (the free acting human agent) and object (the passive-acted upon thing). This division is related to the notion that we, as Homo sapiens, are unique among the natural species (as if not every species were unique in itself!). We perceive ourselves as belonging to a totally different order: the realm of culture, while all other beings and inanimate things are only nature.

Barbara Noske. Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. 1997.

[postmodernismruinedme]

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens - that letting go - you let go because you can. The world will always be there - while you sleep it will be there - when you wake it will be there as well. So you can sleep and there is reason to wake. A dead hydrangea is as intricate and lovely as one in bloom. Bleak sky is as seductive as sunshine, miniature orange trees without blossom or fruit are not defective; they are that. So the windows of the greenhouse can be opened and the weather let it. The latch on the door can be left unhooked, the muslin removed, for the soldier ants are beautiful too and whatever they do will be part of it.

- Toni Morrison, Tar Baby

[mirakano]

Anti-Tech Introductory Reading List

Industrial Society and Its Future

Technological Slavery

Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

The Technological Society

Walden

The Hermeneutics of Ecological Limitation

We live in a highly technologized world that is hostile to human well-being. Every technological advance comes at a sharp cost to human freedom and the natural world.

[Start with ISAIF (a very brief and worthwhile read), then move on to Technological Slavery. If you are interested in further anti-tech writings—or want to get involved—check out Wilderness Front.]