Only Ending War Can Protect The Environment
The notion that humanity is going to meaningfully act to protect the environment without ending the constant state of war is absurd. One of the many lies humanity tells itself.
At every level of society, the unceasing competition to achieve dominance makes it an impossibility that the human race can truly cooperate to address the environmental challenges we are all facing.
If each country is seeking to gain some advantage over other countries, then nobody can be trusted. If the countries with more dominance and wealth insist on maintaining that advantage, then it will not be possible to gain the cooperation of poorer countries who want to improve the living conditions and to get themselves out from under the control of larger more dominant countries.
Looking with a clear eye, without vested interest, these conclusions are obvious and undeniable. Yet governments, climate and environmental scientists and big environmental organizations don’t even begin to address these points. They go on pretending that the collective we are somehow going to address the global problems we face while simultaneously being in a constant state of war.
The war is both military and economic. On the military side, any country that does not want to be a vassal to another country has to arm itself. The world is in a constant arms race. Any country that decides to stand down, will be taken advantage of by larger predatory countries.
On the economic side it is the same thing. Countries with bigger economies use that to their advantage to leverage the choices of smaller countries. Because of the constant state of economic war, countries feel compelled to keep extracting ‘resources’.
For example, Venezuela is under constant threat from the United States. The U.S. does not like independent countries. It wants them under its umbrella so it can dictate to them. The hope of Venezuela to maintain their independence comes from their large fossil fuel reserves. They cannot even consider the choice to leave those fuels in the ground and take a different course.
At the business level, any company that decided to change its behavior would be put out of business. If they stopped the relentless extraction of trees, minerals, metals, oil, gas, etc., that would be the end of them. If they stopped functioning through the competitive model that prioritizes growth and profit above all else, they would quickly be eaten themselves.
At the individual level it is the same fundamental behavior. Everyone is trying to ‘get ahead’… to gain some advantage, to make more money, to get well known, to be admired. This is why governments and corporations have no trouble at all to find employees to do the work that is destroying the environment we depend on.
There are numerous polls that indicate the majority of people want to protect the environment, want old growth forests preserved, want to end war and so on. However, such polls are dishonest and so are the majority of people answering them. The real question that is being asked and answered is not whether they want to protect the environment, but whether they want to protect the environment while maintaining the status quo and the life they aspire to.
An honest question would ask whether the person is willing to give up the life they aspire to and the self identity they have crafted in order to have a healthy environment. Asked that way, it will not be a majority. This is because there is a war that individuals, businesses and governments all share. The war on Nature.
There is only one outcome possible in this war. Humanity loses. The human ego wants to think of itself as big and powerful. It isn’t. Governments and corporations do not have power, they have authority and obedience. All the individual human egos are vested in the belief of human supremacy over nature so they fundamentally support the governments and corporations. There is disagreement over how to express that supremacy, but the basic stance is near unanimous.
If the majority of people truly wanted a different path, it would happen. Governments and corporations would be incapable of stopping it. They wouldn’t even try as they have no real power. Nature has power. If a majority of people had ended the war on nature within themselves, the force of that would be like a tsunami. It would wash over the old and the governments and corporations would meekly give way to it and dissolve into nothingness.
This doesn’t happen because the vast majority of people are driven primarily by the human ego and so still at war with nature. The actions of governments and corporations are not some rogue force, but rather the human ego expressing itself at a more macro level. These institutions are expressing the will of the collective ego. So the question is: “Will the collective ego choose to extinct itself as a species rather than face its own impotence and then surrender?”
