The End of Environmentalism

There are more than a few strong signs indicating the terminal stage of environmentalism. Clearest signals are coming from the top: Some of the most influential figures in the environmental movement have come out one after the other with extraordinary statements, not only admitting to their personal failures but went as far as suggesting a possible collapse of the environmental cause itself.¹ There were no strong denials to these claims from other environmentalists, possibly because the message has already spread on the ground: environmental organizations are either trying to reorient their agenda to more relevant causes, reducing their operations or annulling their existence all together.² Some of them are trying to justify these decisions by claiming an unconvincing victory but that can fool no one.³ In fact similar changes happening in many different organizations are an unmistakable proof that their funding sources are going dry. Billionaires and millionaires are changing their priorities too; they are stating that for them environmental causes would no longer be at the top of the list.⁴ But the most striking symbol of environmentalism’s demise is the world’s most famous environmentalist, Greta Thunberg. Greta, who became instantly world famous through her ›climate activism‹ as a high school student, was for a few years on every magazine cover and every screen; she was even invited to Davos in order to berate the world-eaters to their faces while they watched her silently as if they were audience-participants in a fashionable art event. But after Al-Aqsa Flood, the destruction of Gaza and the live streamed genocide, Greta took on the Palestinian cause. She spoke at the rallies, wore the keffiyeh and joined the flotilla that was attempting to break the blockade around Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, in this instance she didn’t receive any celebrity treatment; following the boarding of her ship in international waters, she was hijacked, imprisoned, starved and tortured by Zionist thugs.⁵ The publications which celebrated her ›Climate Strikes‹ were silent too although her latest exploits were by all measures even more spectacular. Greta as a savvy but also genuinely sincere professional activist saw the writing on the wall even a little late, she followed the trail of other keen but much less sincere opportunists who got on the environmental boat in the hopes of finding a niche worth exploiting. They left one after the other when environmentalism as a political and cultural market reached a saturation point. When the opportunists are leaving the ship, it is as good as under water.

Environmentalism’s demise might be a teachable moment for anyone interested but it is not surprising when seen in light of its history. Although its roots can be traced back to the campaigns in the 60s against acid rains, pesticides, air pollution and radioactive contamination, environmentalism grew into prominence especially in the 80s and 90s. The first modern environmental issues arose in the industrialized countries during the post war boom. The rebuilding of Europe and Japan and establishment of mass consumer economies in order to support the ongoing demographic and industrial expansion were the basis of the event later called The Great Acceleration, which was simply a new stage in capital’s development.⁶ This new stage and new ›society‹ required the intensification of production and consumption cycles which in turned plagued the masses with ›too much civilization‹. Until that point ›waste‹ as such was never seriously reckoned with by the capitalists, the permanent smog over many industrial towns were accepted as a fact of life and was even ›aestheticized‹ by poets of the previous era who had to inhale it while dreaming of another world. In this latest stage though, industrial processes and the waste products they inescapably generated, threatened the lives of the population but even more importantly for capital, its capacity for continuous accumulation. Capital didn’t become enlightened when this reality became apparent either, it took long struggles on many fronts to finally get it to acknowledge its own environmental contradictions. Early environmental campaigns were waged against threats whose immediate effects were directly observable. These were political struggles in the most basic sense of the term; local populations fighting for sovereignty on their own existence by resisting the incursion of national and global forces; on every level the masses were literally fighting for their lives. The solutions found and implemented for these problems after decades long campaigns were mainly technical: scrubbers installed on chimneys to filter out the sulfurous content which caused acid rains and air pollution, switching to coal sources that have less sulfur in them, more efficient engines and exhaust technologies for vehicles, alternative pesticides to replace DDT which was proven to be a serious health hazard. As for the nuclear plants, they stayed in operation all through the post war era. Europe in particular needed them for its growing energy demands. But there was another reason for their continued existence: For all the ›Nuclear Powers‹ like the USA, UK, France and the Soviet Union, their nuclear energy programs were always seen in connection with their nuclear weapons and the nightmare of a possible nuclear apocalypse. That conviction had a material basis as well since the production of nuclear weapons were integrated into the production and waste cycles of nuclear plants in a rare but highly effective example of a recycling solution. What stopped nuclear energy from becoming the norm was its cost; the unit energy cost produced by nuclear plants far exceeding oil, gas or coal plants mostly because of the security and redundancy measures required to convert radioactive material into electricity. As these dangers were ameliorated or pushed a little further into the future, new threats arose, larger in scope and even more insidious. The political solution ruling classes came up with was twofold; first they moved their factories away from their own citizens, to countries which couldn’t yet afford environmental legislation. But they had another problem on their hands; the political movements of the 60s carried the threat of forming a powerful coalition that could threaten the established order right down to its foundations. Popular environmental causes had the potential to radicalize a large segment of the population who had so far been passive and uninterested in politics. Political fires of the 60s waned in the following decade but its memory remained. Environmental problems came to the fore as signs pointing to the rotten core of the prevailing world order as Vietnam War ended and receded in the background. Modern environmentalism emerged out of that cauldron as a concoction to shape the future using the past. It adopted the spirit of the 60s as a style while rejecting its political substance. This clever formula proved very effective in occluding the actual causes of environmental threats and consuming the political energies of young generations.

The basic conditions for the creation of environmental hazards are straightforward: In a world wholly organized around the sacred principles of market competition, these threats cannot be seen as anything but ›natural‹. Savage competition in monopolized market conditions demands that corporations be callous and ruthless while official agencies tasked with balancing the shared interests of the ruling classes have to be generous and forgiving. Capital, on the lookout for every market opportunity, moves fast and early while the representatives of science who are responsible for pulling on the reins can only follow behind. Responding to public pressure, official environmental agencies always arrive late at the crime scene when they have neither the inclination nor the ability to find the real culprits. It is a game in which everyone accepts their role and plays it faithfully, if not convincingly. In such a world, even the continued existence of human species might be dependent on simple luck: As Crutzen remarked regarding the trajectory of the Ozone Depletion problem, if some other chemical substances had been chosen instead of CFCs when their long term effects on the atmosphere were totally unknown, the depletion of the Ozone layer would have been much more severe and irreversible.⁷ What is less apparent are the origins and function of modern environmentalism’s central concepts. Since new threats kept appearing on every corner, a concept like ›The Environment‹ became necessary for an attempt to reintegrate the ›externalities‹ of capital into the world picture it created. ›The Environment‹ brought together all the known and possible threats capital called into being under a general and comprehensive term. This concession was unavoidable when environmental dangers did not only concern human, animal and plant lives that are all expandable for capital but when it also threatened to disrupt ›market stability‹ or even wipe out entire economic sectors. What capital was looking into and assessing at that point was a new category of risk which existed beyond its balance sheets and after being ignored for a long and profitable period, it finally had to be accounted for. As capital rapidly widened and intensified its operations, growing larger and more complex when its comprehension still lagged behind its appetites, risks reached a global scale. It was this moment of possible crisis that bestowed modern environmentalism all of its defining characteristics. A new worldview had to be born from this impasse, even if an ideological cesarean operation were to be performed. This new worldview that was to be called ›environmentalism‹ fused political campaigns born in the previous decade together by giving them a common identity. People who fought against the poisonous pesticides, air pollution that caused chronic illnesses, acid rains which destroyed crops and nuclear energy which in the form of hydrogen bombs could destroy humanity, from then on all became ›environmentalists‹. Original environmental campaigns were rooted in immediate threats to specific communities or the population at large and even when they involved animals or plants, that was mainly through their relationships to human beings, albeit sometimes only aesthetical on the parts of people, like trying to save the birds they grew up listening to or the trees under whose shade they took shelter. Inside this new identity though, the concrete nature of the original environmental struggles were all but forgotten. A new and heavy responsibility was put on the shoulders of environmentalists who were asked to give up trying to improve the lives of human beings. They were told that their efforts were to be towards saving ›The Planet‹.

›The Planet‹ was the next iteration of ›The Environment‹ which was designed for mass consumption. Where did it came from? Obviously from space. ›The Planet‹ was an unexpected but useful product of the space race that went on for decades between the Soviet Union and USA. Aside from its military products like satellites and ICBMs which were the main harvest of the enormous investment, the Space Race was also a long and wide reaching propaganda campaign for both sides. Among all the other tangible and lethal technology, the race to the space also produced some astonishing images; for the first time in its history, the planet Earth, once thought of as the center of the whole universe was seen from the outside, proving that it is just another body floating in space. That striking vision of a blue planet traversing the dark emptiness, illuminated by its faithful Sun, touched a collective nerve. Humanity’s common fate was discovered anew, this time on the ›Spaceship Earth‹. Spaceship Earth was the name given to this belated but essential understanding of an ultimate unity of everything on Earth with each other. This unity though required a careful and mature ›stewardship‹: Earth and humanity could not be left to its own devices, a planetary scale governing structure had become absolutely necessary. This reality dawned on a certain segment of the ruling class when nuclear war was all but probable and liberation struggles around the world were gaining momentum. The Third World had woken from its slumber and realized that the first task after liberation was industrialization. The World Bank under the management of former war secretary McNamara issued warnings about a possible population explosion in the developing countries.⁸ A more ›scientific‹ expression of those same fears, published in the same period became infamous for its apocalyptic, near future scenarios which even after five decades never even got close to being realized.⁹ The ruling classes felt stuck on the same planet with the growing human masses and were afraid to be overwhelmed by them even if they still firmly held the levers of power. Environmentalism thus had a double function; the first was to slow down the industrialization of the third world through myriad diplomatic schemes, international treaties and a framework of global governance; it also aimed inside the West in order to consume the political energies of the population. In the first case, environmentalism was an international political enterprise built with rare rapidity in a few years. The center of that effort was the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) established in 1972 by a former petroleum company executive. Global environmental governance provided a way to bring countries of the world together under terms established by the Western leadership when the U.N. was still guided by it. Though this effort got off the ground and grew in sophistication very quickly with incestuously multiplying agreements, committees and conferences, it faltered when it came to derailing the developing economies. Environmental concerns could not stand in history’s way and industry could not be tied down by any kind of diplomacy; the treaties or committee reports which didn’t fit into developmental plans or capital’s interests were simply ignored, first by the Western governments themselves with the rest of the world simply following the lead of these old hands at double-dealing and hypocrisy. Environmental governance proved to be impotent to determine the path of global development but environmentalism as an ideology was still capable of shaping the political imagination of its era. Modern environmentalism announced itself through a massive marketing campaign, initiated by the first ever ›Earth Day‹; Earth Day was different from the usual protests in that it was officially sanctioned, the event had the aura of a mass movement inherited from the 60s but it was more like a festival than a political rally. The Earth was to be saved but how and from whom? In the imagination of environmentalism, ›The Planet‹ existed outside of the human beings who were asked to be its saviors. It was a fetishistic object, commodity fetishism enlarged to the utmost degree. Through its lens, Earth was reduced to a bland image rather than grasped as the ground for the totality of relationships born and extinguished during its billions year long history.

Environmentalism’s foundations were laid in the 70s; the first Earth Day came right after the Moon Landing, followed by the founding of EPA and UNEP was established in 1972. But the decade which would shape its destiny was the next one. The Seventies tied into the 80s through a new type of environmental danger, coming invisibly from above. The depletion of the ozone layer was researched, observed and argued for years before it was accepted as a reality and the natural process was also gradual on a scale of decades. It was not an immediate health hazard but more of a severe and global future threat. Ozone issue necessitated frequent measurements, constant observation, predictions and discussions. A new type of science was required, one that is of a planetary scale and capable of making long term predictions. These intersecting developments incubated the modern environmentalism along with its scientific counterpart; a movement focused not on immediate health hazards and disruptions on human life but mostly on overcoming dangers lying still in the future. Because these new threats they tried to address were so large and complex, environmentalists had to rely on scientists to find their way on an unknown terrain. Science filled environmentalism’s theoretical vacuum, specifically the developing field of Earth sciences which enormously expanded its understanding of Earth’s natural mechanisms in a few decades. These new scientific disciplines which were the amalgam of all the natural sciences with methods borrowed from social sciences, advanced as far as the interface of nature and human society, the first one investigated in its complexity but the second one only grasped as an undifferentiated whole, translated into a single natural mechanism after stripped clear of its contradictions. Environmental scientists usually worked for universities or government institutions, in laboratories funded by transnational corporations and with the expanding intellectual property laws often themselves in a position to profit from the problems they were investigating, by forming companies and applying for patents. Environmentalism became the chosen path of these scientists to deal with the consequences of their work and to engage with the political side of ›science‹, as if scientific practice was not politically determined from start to finish; nevertheless environmentalism was a way for them to step out of their laboratories or classrooms and go into the wider world. The formula of such science driven environmentalism prescribed three steps to solve environmental problems; the first and the most crucial step was the initial scientific discovery that could only be made and explained by the experts, the public then followed their lead through pressure campaigns which had to be built on scientific consensus in order to be effective and the end goal was forcing the governments to commit to solutions through international agreements. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 which banned the production and usage of ozone depleting CFC gases, apparently proved that formula. But scientists kept looking and found out about another threat also originating in the atmosphere and endangering all. Its initial name was the greenhouse problem but that changed to global warming and finally to climate change. The international framework built to solve the issue of climate change was borrowed from the ozone depletion issue, almost entirely. In terms of their natural mechanics, there were similarities; both involved atmospheric gases and were of planetary scale. They were also both long term threats with unknown and varied outcomes. The differences were much significant though; CFC gases could be replaced with their functional equivalents that could be produced in the same facilities whereas there were yet no real replacements for the whole fossil fuel family, coal, oil and gas, with comparable energy density and transportability. Through adopting the Montreal model, the international climate change framework was turned into a maze with no exit. Scientific papers and public pressure campaigns were irrelevant against the overwhelming reality; the energy infrastructure of the entire world, its geopolitical dimensions and extensions into official politics. Climate change became the central environmental issue partly because climate, as defined by the Earth sciences, was an amorphous concept that can be related to everything else; as all human, animal and plant lives are shaped by long term weather patterns, their relationships to each other could be expressed by its terms and most of the perceived problems between them could be tied down to the climate as the one common, overarching factor. There were always more dimensions to a changing climate that could be discovered by scientists, more threats approaching in the not so distant future but rarely new opportunities or any good news. The other reason for climate change becoming the focal point of environmental politics was that this issue was integrated into the international political stage on every level. The first climate change treaty, UNFCCC was followed by Kyoto and the Paris Agreement all of which were signed by most of the governments of the world. This rapidly built consensus expressed ruling classes’ growing fears of a planetary scale, unprecedented environmental change that could effect their interests. When climate change became central to international politics, it took center stage in national politics as well since monopolized capital operated globally. Environmentalists accepted this state of affairs and embraced climate change as an unmistakable sign of the righteousness of their cause; just like ›The Environment‹ was the most important treasure that all humans, animals and plants shared, the climate problem took precedence over all other environmental concerns. But this ideological alignment prepared the way for environmentalism becoming enmeshed with the established order that it once wowed to transform. At first the scientific understanding of climate change, and then its reflection in the political imagination were guided by the main culprit of this slow motion catastrophe, the petroleum companies: the first long term and wide scale experiments proving the globally increasing temperatures were performed by Exxon¹⁰ and the idea of a ›Carbon Footprint‹ was concocted by the marketing department of BP.¹¹ Environmentalists were dreaming of changing the world while lying in a bed prepared by their mortal enemies and as a result their worldview was metabolized by the governing order to such a degree that this once political movement ended up expressing itself mainly through international conferences, official science reports, financial incentives and corporate bylaws.

Modern environmentalism came of age in the time of ›The End of History‹. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many hoped and expected a peaceful and prosperous future for the whole world. This hope relied on finally redirecting the vast resources spent on the Cold War to domestic problems that were patiently waiting for a helping hand. The ›Peace Dividend‹ as it was called, was the financial award promised for winning the war against the communist enemy. The climate change problem in particular required rapid advancements in energy technologies and a vast transformation of the entire energy infrastructure. The promised peace did not come; the bombing of Yugoslavia, the Gulf War and anti-globalization protests proved that all was not going right. But the many dissident movements called into being through separate issues had no concrete, unifying aim like socialism which had become completely illegitimate as a concrete political goal. Environmentalism was one of those movements and in a way it was the most amorphous one: its concepts were so loosely defined that they could not be applied in any reliable manner and were thus politically useless; but instead of a political movement, environmentalism was then turned into a new type of awareness. An awareness of unseen things, a mystical worldview which saw itself as wise and realistic like all incarnations of mysticism does, a modern pseudo-religion projected outwards from a selective set of scientific facts. Such an awareness can be turned towards almost anything and in this case it was; over time environmentalism became a hodgepodge of concepts, superstitions and unfounded scenarios, all the things floating around in late 20th century culture many of which ultimately proved detrimental to the environmental cause. With those, environmentalism grew larger than life and was effective only in recycling these vague ideas into the political imagination by expressing them in a language borrowed from and resembling the language of science. As to the actual science, with each passing year the environmental picture became clearer but environmentalists remained politically ignorant and bewildered. They felt the lack of a guiding light which could have only come from a firm grasp of the material forces behind every environmental threat, but the practice of honest criticism or class based politics were so alien to environmentalism that all they had left was moral posturing and grandstanding. For its place, political theory was the sole remaining ›capital‹ of socialists in a time when the idea of socialism had been banished from politics. Many of those socialists tacked on to environmentalism to revive their fading political hopes and in the case of some socialist intellectuals, their often sidelined careers. For these people, environmentalism was the backdoor for socialism in a time of triumphalist capitalism. This was an instance of partially well intentioned opportunism which hoped to ride the environmental wave as far as socialism. Since the name ›socialism‹ was by then passé and in need of a serious makeover, these closeted socialists renamed themselves as ecosocialists. In a short time it became apparent that ecosocialism didn’t offer the working class anything new or concrete since it was mainly an academic enterprise. Ecosocialists didn’t explain to the population how and why their lives were under a new form of invasion by the microscopic agents of capitalistic production and consumption. Ecosocialism was simply a proposal of theirs to get out of the environmental impasse by adopting their own very diluted brand of socialism which consisted of public investments in renewable energy projects or at its most extreme edge, nationalizing the entire energy sector. As such, the ecosocialist approach to environmental problems completely bypassed the only real path to social transformation, that is class struggle. The agent of such possible change, the working class was absent in its schemes. In fact ecosocialists had an aversion to the concerns of the working class which became apparent when during the pandemic, most of them sided with the ruling classes in insisting on lockdowns coupled with forceful vaccine mandates and by these acts tarnished their reputations to an irreparable degree. Along with the pandemic, ecosocialist were proven wrong on every other important question. Their task as socialist intellectuals specializing in environmental issues was to chart a path for the class struggle to adapt to changing conditions, and most crucially, avoid being sidetracked or misled by the many machinations of the ruling class. As it happened in the past few decades, working class politics completely subordinated itself to bourgeois politics by way of ecology. Ecology was defined as being above all forms of politics and ecosocialists swallowed this oldest trick of the ruling classes whole.

What the ecosocialists ignored was the politically most pertinent and abiding fact about environmentalism, that all modern environmental politics is fundamentally Malthusian. As a price for removing class struggle from the center of their theory to its margins, ecosocialists also remained ignorant about its original cause, which is poverty. For what was the venerable cleric and economist Malthus’ essential idea? That nature and humans stand essentially apart and humans’ ability of directing natural processes towards their own aims is very limited at best. According to Malthus and his students in every generation, poverty is a natural product, with the direct corollary that poor themselves also belong to the natural realm and not to the human one. The poor cannot be considered human beings when the poverty which defines their existence is natural. How do environmentalists relate to poverty then, if they relate to it at all? In fact poverty and its natural roots has been central to all incarnations of environmentalism since its inception. It can even be argued that environmentalist outlook was constructed as a response to the rapidly growing poverty, not in order to investigate its real sources but more to explain away its presence. The concept of ›collapse‹ which has been a cornerstone of environmental theory since its beginning in Malthus right up to its latest form in Planetary Boundaries¹² is tied to poverty as the second term in a causal relationship. In the environmentalist discourse, collapse becomes inevitable when a fundamental and unalterable law of nature is ignored; if human beings continuously attempt to extract from nature more than she can bear, total destruction will be the certain outcome. Thus the desire of ever growing human masses to build tolerable, decent lives for themselves must be at every turn ruthlessly suppressed since even a partial victory on their part will bring out the vengeful side of nature who ultimately cannot be denied. Environmentalism in all its stages, explicitly or implicitly preached that the poor have to stay poor because if the wonders of civilization and the generosity of nature are offered to the unwashed masses, nature will eventually resign from its duty and let the humanity to starve. Every incarnation of environmentalism so far justified the vast human misery of its own age using an objective sounding language with terms borrowed from various sciences, which in reality expressed the ruling classes’ view of humanity excluding themselves.

Environmentalists, by accepting the dichotomy of nature against civilization also ended up seeing nature as something »for-itself«. According to them, humans in their civilized state were always condemned to stand outside of nature’s harmony with the added responsibility of guarding it from their own instincts and creations. Consequently, environmental politics could only succeed in a negative form, in slowing down industry’s ransacking of nature through clear cutting forests, building dams or digging up mines. It waged a hopeless war against the moving weight of history which assumed the character of a natural force long before anyone ever heard of a thing called ›The Environment‹. But for them there was also an exception to the rule of ›leaving nature alone‹, which was energy transformation since climate change overrode all other environmental concerns as a planetary emergency. The campaign for energy transformation was waged on two fronts; first by promoting renewable energy as a clean and efficient alternative to fossil fuels, but also more ambitiously through large scale infrastructural projects which attempted to fuse environmentalism with working class politics. In the first case, new solar panels and wind turbines were integrated into the existing, fossil fuel based energy infrastructure instead of replacing it, even if gradually. Thus promising as it once was, renewable energy did next to nothing to reduce the carbon emissions which were said to be the only identified culprit for the coming climate catastrophe. In USA, the plan to rebuild the entire energy infrastructure was named ›The Green New Deal‹ as a reference to Roosevelt administration’s national program to reduce unemployment and increase production through massive public investments. The original New Deal was pushed through right after the financial meltdown of 1929 and similarly the newer green one was coming after the 2008 financial crisis. Roosevelt’s New Deal tied into the war effort which did a lot to suppress internal dissent to this vast project from incorrigible capitalists. Unfortunately for the second one, no such unifying national cause was emerging and a bitter political fight had to be fought against the most stubborn and well established camp of the bourgeoisie, along with their representatives everywhere, in order to bring this complicated plan to fruition. At the time, the political landscape looked unsuited for such an effort since after Reagan and Thatcher’s ideological reorientation, even ›socialistic‹ policies like public employment or government planning had been banished from politics. That meant the need for a mass mobilization comparable to the one preceding Roosevelt’s reforms. Environmentalism had no concrete social base to rely upon while the working class was demoralized and disorganized. Thus the newest ›New Deal‹ floundered against the limits of official politics and against the unwillingness to try and overcome them.¹³ There was still a role for environmentalist to play though, in warning the population against new environmental hazards like microplastics, electromagnetic fields (EMF) and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Why didn’t they take on these causes? In that too environmentalism failed to breach the Malthusian walls: they always found themselves either on one side or the other but couldn’t find a way to understand nature and human beings together. Nature and human beings, rather than being two separate ›natures‹ are instead modes of relationships with themselves and each other; nature determining the conditions for its own transformation through human labor and in that process continuously transforming human beings, at some stages nature being the active force and at others human beings assuming that role by imposing their will on the natural world. The path of this moving relationship and the trajectory of human history will be determined by how the transformative powers of human labor are organized. In a capitalist mode of production where fierce market competition demands an all out war between corporations, everything the capital can get its hands of turns into a weapon, nature being the most readily available and potent one. In the unending search for profit, many weapons are fired at every direction and unavoidably many bodies get hit. The only way to exhaustively investigate such an environmental problem would be looking at its history in order to find out how it came about, going through the maze of its creation to discover the links between natural processes and social organization, so that in the end it would be clear how human labor is organized and directed to what purpose determined all the intended or seemingly accidental consequences of its successes or failures. An environmentalism capable of transforming the world will have to put human labor at the center of its theory.

Environmentalists’ last great hope was previously one of their adversaries, that is technology. Environmentalist outlook always had a complicated relationship with this elemental social force; when coupled with industry it was still seen as the main enabler of environmental destruction, though even there exceptions had to be made for solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. But technology also offered something beyond these limited solutions which often ended up causing more problems when realized; in the techno-utopian vision, technology carried the promise of bypassing industry altogether and lifting civilization above ground. The new economy, the virtual world or simply the internet was hailed as the savior of the planet from the incessant activity of human beings. As more economic activities were transported from the physical world on to its virtual counterpart, the overall effect on the environment was expected to decrease, which made a clean break between the economy and the environment possible. Such a hopeful scenario was named decoupling: continuous economic growth without increased environmental impact or carbon emissions.¹⁴ Decoupling was the subject of an intense academic discussion for at least a decade, researchers looked for the signs of its advent in GDP numbers and predicted a future economy in which value creation was freed from its earthly origins. For this scenario to come true, the digital sector had to be at least relatively self sufficient and stable, all such hopeful future projections presumed a steady growth of the digital economy, incorporating more areas of economic activity while also getting more and more efficient. But these scenarios ignored one simple historical fact even though it was well known and acknowledged by everyone; the inclination of corporations to take over and dissolve into one another, rooted in capital’s instinctual drive towards monopolization. Monopolization in the digital sector ran parallel to the privatization of the actual digital infrastructure; underwater internet cables which the whole world relied on were bought by Meta and Alphabet while internet access satellites were launched by Starlink and other companies. As happened in all previous instances, monopolization was followed by expansion, facilitated and driven by finance capital. Financialization of the economy almost seemed to be nearing a saturation point but digitalization gave it a new impetus after the fictitious capital made a pact with the virtual world. Amazon warehouses turned from hosting web sites to housing the entire security apparatuses of states while all the major tech companies became highly leveraged and reliant on the high value of their stocks. This transformation was actually what the decouplers hoped for in essence, but not in form, resulting in a completely different picture from what they expected. The digital economy, instead of containing and diminishing the physical one, launched a large scale invasion against it in the shape of warehouses and data centers. It captured large parts of the physical world and proceeded to exploit its colonies mercilessly, channeling vital resources such as water and energy to its battlements. AI is the latest agent of this assault of monopolized finance capital which can take on the most abstract forms while requiring complex supply lines, rare materials and constant, abundant energy. What should environmentalists say when the expected emissions from planned future data centers will rival whole countries even while their contribution on productivity is uncertain? The answers can only be found in the history and development of finance capital.

When its death was previously announced, the obituary mentioned environmentalism’s ineffectiveness and lack of reflection as the main cause of its demise¹⁵ but there can be multiple stages to the death of an ideology: even though it failed to realize its aims as a political movement, as a worldview environmentalism continued to shape the political imagination for some time. This was the quintessential ideology of the late 20th century and as such it reproduced all of its main characteristics, its errors, hopes and fears. Just like the era that shaped it, environmentalism was defined by its myriad incongruities, its stated ambitions compared with its modest means, its grandiose narrative covering up its lack of a coherent theory. It essentially forewarned hell and promised heaven but what it actually prescribed was more of the same. The threat of a nuclear apocalypse cast a long shadow on the second half of the last century and environmentalism’s occupation with existential threats reflects that influence. Born out of fear and blinded by the fog of a cold war, awoken by planetary scale threats but then put to sleep with the ›End Of History‹, in vain it searched for an exit from an era which hurtled toward at least one catastrophe among potentially many. That era came to a close with such rapidity and clarity that even the most basic ideals of environmental cause started to seem absurd. The mirage of ›The Planet‹ disintegrated as geopolitical fracture lines reappeared and questions long thought to be answered reintroduced themselves. This political sea change showed up at the environmental stage in different forms. USA, after sabotaging the Copenhagen Agreement of 2009 to virtual ineffectiveness, finally signed on to the latest climate agreement at Paris in 2015 to great fanfare but caused an even bigger stir when recently elected President Trump announced that they were leaving the agreement because it favored Chinese interests over American. This was more of a declaration of intent rather than concrete action since the Paris Agreement did not include any coercive measures and had emission standards so loose that it made no practical difference to be a party of the agreement or not. The next American government rejoined the agreement in a symbolic act of unity with rest of the world but took another action to undermine that message with the Nord Stream Sabotage. Blowing up under sea gas pipelines caused a catastrophe for marine life as well as the single largest emission event in human history but there was hardly a peep out of the environmentalists. These developments dug its grave but what finally finished it off was the same force that wreaks destruction every time it is awaken, killing off every sort of thing including hopes and dreams: It was war which killed environmentalism. War delegitimized the current form of environmental cause by clarifying the confusing world picture, by giving perspective to anyone paying attention. War set everyone’s priorities straight. Environmentalists couldn’t even respond when they were forced into silence against the reality of war. Its voice could not be heard over the falling bombs. Talking about emissions in the face of mass destruction is obscene even though some still attempt it. But that is not all. War unleashes the violent forces lying dormant in daily life not as a naked vision of humanity’s real nature but as the expression of structures, institutions, and social organizations which built up that lethal capacity. Politics seen in its most forceful form makes it irrelevant to talk about ›humanity‹ or ›nature‹ as undifferentiated and opposing totalities. In industrial warfare, nature is put to work by organized active knowledge and it is human beings who are treated as ›nature‹ when whole cities are turned into deserts in a matter of days. War reveals the true character of the ties between humans and nature, their ability to transform themselves and each other but also their seemingly endless capacity for mutual destruction.

References

Image: »Later. Sunset after a rainy day. No wind«, William Ascroft 1883

A German translation can be found here:

Das Ende der Umweltschutzbewegung