I just read Jackson and Jensen’s An Inconvenient Apocalypse, after seeing this review by Veronica Esposito in The Guardian.
As a long-time doomer, I was more interested in the review than the book. It’s much more socially acceptable to talk about the apocalypse now than it was 15 years ago, but I’m never quite sure how far along normal people are with accepting it.
The book itself was okay, a quick intro to the doomer point of view. So let’s start reviewing the review:
In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen style themselves as heralds of some very bad news: societal collapse on a global scale is inevitable, and those who manage to survive the mass death and crumbling of the world as we know it will have to live in drastically transformed circumstances. According to Jackson and Jensen, there’s no averting this collapse – electric cars aren’t going to save us, and neither are global climate accords. The current way of things is doomed, and it’s up to us to prepare as best we can to ensure as soft a landing as possible when the inevitable apocalypse arrives.
“The book tries to be blunt and honest about the depth of the crisis,” said Jensen, “and to be blunt and honest about the current solutions, which do nothing to deal with the depth of the crisis.” Jackson added: “Now humanity is on a whole different journey than a gathering-hunting society. I saw that we were going to pay for this some day, and we’re going to pay in a big way.”
This is an accurate summary with illustrative quotes. You can tell that Esposito has distanced herself, though. They’re claiming to tell the truth. Are they? Esposito has subtly framed this so it’s more about how they style themselves as truth tellers. Being doomed is just, like, their opinion, y’know?
I don’t think the book says a single word about trans people, but she wants the reader to know that Jensen has TERF stigma:
Jackson and Jensen make for an interesting pairing. The former is an agronomist, having spent his career studying the problem of soil erosion and developing The Land Institute, which seeks to develop grains that can be used for sustainable agriculture. For his efforts he has garnered a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Right Livelihood Award, among other honors. Jensen is a longtime journalist who has written books on ecology, masculinity and radical feminism. He has received backlash for propounding exclusionary and harmful views against transgender people, specifically targeting transgender women, and in response to the criticism he has doubled down on these viewpoints, continuing to promulgate them.
This is the very next paragraph:
In Jackson and Jensen’s view, the dawn of agriculture represents something like original sin. This is what got humanity on to the course of increasing energy use and material wealth that has brought us to the current ecological crisis. Via this reading of human history, the authors seem to be arguing that our trajectory as a technological species capable of high energy use and large-scale agriculture is a mistake that has taken us to a place we never should have been, and has doomed us. In conversation Jackson endorsed this viewpoint, telling me that our way of life has us “caught in a big Ponzi scheme that we’ve probably had for 10,000 years. We know how Ponzi schemes tend to end. They’re not nice things to have to deal with.”
Notice how she draws no connection between the positions on TERFs and agriculture, even though the one explains the other.
Being a doomer is a very materialist view of history. It has an anarcho-primitivist, anti-civilization bent, as well. That means thinking the problems started earlier than the Marxists say they did. A significant section of the book is about defending a materialist view, actually. The original sin isn’t capitalism, but agriculture and with it the emergence of patriarchy. The emphasis on materialism and patriarchy means that these views are aligned with radical feminism, which has drawn similar conclusions.
The trans movement…has a problematic relationship with physical reality. It doesn’t have a theory of patriarchy. It wants to throw all that sex-based analysis out the window. Esposito frames it like Jensen just says harmful things about trans people because he’s mean, not because the ideologies are actually inconsistent.
I thought it was tedious how much space they spent at the start of the book making ceremonial apologies for being white men, but I guess it’s necessary. The next segment of the review is another common smear of doomers: that we’re all white male eco-fascist types.
The answer to this Ponzi scheme involves shrinking humanity from the current 7.7 billion people to a more sustainable 2 or 3 billion. An Inconvenient Apocalypse doesn’t describe how exactly this decline in population will occur, nor reckon with the enormous trauma that the elimination of the majority of humanity will inflict on humans and our societies. Although the book is nominally oriented toward social justice, the authors make no effort to address the fact that such a population decline would probably be an absolute disaster for marginalized ethnicities and sexualities, those who are disabled or mentally unwell, and basically anyone not deemed fit for survival in the new world. In conversation, Jensen offered this explanation:
“A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.”
Actually, the book is clear that the most painless way of reducing population is to keep the birth rate below the rate of replacement. The point of the book is that that’s probably not going to happen, and there’s going to be a massive population reduction whether we like it or not, and it’s probably going to be the worst thing that ever happened, and the more we think about this ahead of time the more we can keep our humanity as it starts to happen. This is the essence of being a doomer, the recognition that we’re in a very bad predicament.
It’s clear that Esposito has an image of doomers as far right instead of far left. LOL “paleo diet, but for society” as a naive description of anarcho-primitivism or “anti-civ.” “Make the Earth great again.” Sigh…
According to Jackson and Jensen, once the collapse occurs and the Earth’s population declines, it is up to humans to figure out how to live in a “low-energy” future – that is, one where fossil fuels are no longer used and we essentially are back to relying on our own muscles and those of beasts of burden. In terms of what that low energy world might look like, An Inconvenient Apocalypse articulates an ethos that might be summed up as the paleo diet, but for society. Because 10,000 years of so-called progress has left us in “dire straits”, the answer involves looking back to the prehistoric millennia before humans developed agriculture, began writing down their history, and built societal hierarchies. Insofar as An Inconvenient Apocalypse describes how this future could look, it involves tradespeople and agricultural workers elevated to the high-status ranks of society, the affluent getting taken down some notches, a wholesale elimination of the cosmopolitan, consumerist world, and religion playing a prominent role. One is tempted to sum it up as “make the Earth great again”.
Why the scare quotes around low energy? I think this reflects not having a good intuition for how much energy there is in oil, and how much less there is in the alternatives. She’s rejected the premises, so she doesn’t follow the argument. She’s not seeing the mathematical certainty of it all, the way it’s a physics and biology problem before it’s a political problem. Socialist governments would also have to face collapse.
She hasn’t accepted that there’s something deeply wrong with our culture, which has brought us to this point, so we need to self-consciously come up with new values.
And again, she really doesn’t get that she’s writing about the MOST egalitarian political philosophy: anarchism. The point is that there shouldn’t BE “high-status ranks of society”, not to have a Party and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” or whatever. The future will look more like bands of about 100 people.
Esposito wants there to be a nonsensical “middle ground” between growth and contraction…because apparently things are just fine at the current scale.
The world of An Inconvenient Apocalypse is a very bleak one, and also one with no middle ground. The authors write that “the future of continued endless expansion that we have long imagined is over and a new future defined by contraction is coming”. Any attempt to find some kind of middle way through these two poles is simple “denying, minimizing and ignoring” a problem that we must all face. The emphasis on this book is on being blunt and stating truths that the authors believe to be self-evident – there is little effort by Jackson and Jensen to argue their case or to convince others. To be fair, Jackson and Jensen seem to be aware that their style will put off many, stating their expectation that many readers will simply abandon their book. Jensen said: “We set out to write a book that, in some sense, everybody will have a reason to dislike.”
I think the facts are so overwhelming at this point that it would be a waste of time to rehash them. It really is a matter of people’s emotional willingness to engage with reality, rather than reality actually being hard to understand. I think she’s reacting negatively to not having the usual bullshit indulged. If you think the future’s going to look like today except with electric cars, you don’t want to understand. Just in the last week or two, it came out that there isn’t enough metal in the world to transition to renwables.
The world is finite, so our growth in the world can’t be infinite. Lots of people are heavily invested in not understanding that basic fact.
I guess she didn’t get what she needed from the authors emotionally, in order to really listen:
For a book predicting the mass death of most of humanity and the end of life as we know it, An Inconvenient Apocalypse is chillingly cerebral. There is virtually no room for acknowledging – much less processing – the emotional toll that such a message will take on both the authors and their readers. That can make the book feel cold and condescending. In conversation, Jensen showed more vulnerability, offering some of the feelings that his vision for humanity raised within himself. In this reader’s opinion, letting this vulnerability through more often in An Inconvenient Apocalypse would have made for a more relatable and ultimately more compelling read.
“I’ve wrestled with what this means in everyday life,” and Jensen, “and these are distressing questions. It’s about wrestling with that sense of grief, rather than trying to avoid it. And when you wrestle with that, it means you don’t wake up every day on the sunny side of the street. It’s weighing on a lot of us. My goal is just try to open up space for people to say what’s on their mind.”
The thing is, people are already feeling the emotional weight of knowing all this shit in the back of our minds. What’s radical (in our culture) is to simply face reality, to not view reality as a TV show we’d prefer ended differently.
About being “chillingly cerebral,” the thing is that you have to think about a lot of different topics and how they relate before you really SEE the gestalt of the doomer outlook. You need to learn some amount of earth science and biology and history and psychology and political science. It’s about understanding those things together and then assessing that we’re not gonna get our shit together in time.
Jackson and Jensen are ready to talk about our most serious problems, but Esposito refuses to engage, because it’s too upsetting. That’s exactly the reason the tone is “chillingly cerebral.” You actually CAN’T hold that much grief in your head all at once and still think analytically. The idea is that scientific conclusions don’t care about your feelings, and Esposito is reading the book as a consumer instead of using the book to build up her own picture of reality. Bad news feels bad, so yuck, and I heard that guy hates trans people so nevermind him anyway…
If you can accept the reality of these problems, we’re never going to solve them with Esposito’s attitude. The negative reviews of doom stuff always illustrate why we’re doomed.