Welcome news today, or so we’re told: “Meta to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion in Landmark Settlement Over Social Media Addiction Claims.” The settlement came after multiple lawsuits charging the company’s platforms “endangered children.”

Of course, Zuckerberg and the rest of the social media management parasites should be hung from lampposts for what they’ve done, which is knowingly harm children for money, using nefarious machine systems. (Talk about evil…) Perhaps some other time when society gets serious about dealing with its sociopaths.

Meanwhile, we have this picayune settlement declared “landmark.” Really? It is literally nothing to Meta, which racked up more than $200 billion in revenues last year, a 22 percent increase over 2024. Fools keep flocking to its platforms, precisely because of their intentionally addictive properties. But you can forgive the fools for being weak and stupid; what’s unforgivable are the actions of the people exploiting them.

I’m now in the final stages of a new book, Rebels Against Oblivion: Fighting in the Age of Ecological Catastrophe, which is about civil disobedience for environment and climate and in defense of Mother Earth’s right not to be raped for resources. It also tells the story of the rise of citizen assemblies and the need for direct democracy to replace representative democracy and jettison our corrupt, demented elected officials who seem only to represent the interests of economic elites and corporate power — the interests that are driving global ecocide.

Direct democracy is no panacea, rule by the demos will likely be chaotic and difficult, but I’m expecting it will be better than the rot we have now.

Speaking of the demos: I wonder what the public would have done with Meta, as opposed to this deplorable settlement for a pittance. Reader comments on the New York Times’ coverage of the story are illuminating. Forthwith, a selection — to give you a sense of the loathing for tech lords and their social media products that suffuses this particular cross-section of the public. My bet is that in a direct democracy Meta would be smashed into a thousand pieces…

J, NY: This outcome is nothing short of an abject failure.

Bill White, Ithaca: Now do something about adult addiction and the mess of disinformation flooding social media.

ScienceSeeksTruth, PNW: Social media, online influencers on YouTube and TikTok, (mostly) violent video games, hmmm, what was the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse again? Junk food probably. Not really joking. It’s not just the very young...several generations of human brains have been deeply damaged to date.

True Norwegian, California: Pocket change. No real change.

Jeff, OR: Social media is 10% good, with its ability to keep friends and family connected, and 90% fantasy, materialistic garbage.

Barney Rubble, Bedrock: I would like to see the tech titans in jail and bankrupted.

Brian, Denver: Cool, now do the exact same for Meta’s role in overturning Democracy itself.

James R. Baca, Albuquerque: Peanuts. They caused a heck of a lot more damage than this.

ILM, North Carolina: With 6.8BN users that’s about $2.50 per FB, WhatsApp & IG account. Chump change — sure they’ll make all that back & more by this election cycle with all the garbage ads, dubious posts/links & AI slop. Lose/lose for culture at large.....

B.G. João Antunes M.F. Batista Neto, Esperanto: Meta, X, every single AI platform, et al should be sued and made to pay every single month. Social media is costing the country and world an infinite amount of brain cells.

Dorne Pentes, Charlotte NC: So? When does Mark Zuckerberg go to jail?

LES ACCAPAREURS DE RÉSERVOIRS: Une bataille contre la confiscation de l’eau dans l’ouest de la France

Au matin du 25 mars 2023, près de trente mille manifestants s’élancent à travers la campagne aux alentours du village de Sainte-Soline, dans l’Ouest de la France. Ils marchent des kilomètres durant, dans des champs boueux et le long de routes de campagne, avant de voir apparaître l’objet de leur colère : le réservoir inachevé de Sainte-Soline. Un ouvrage de 720 000 mètres cubes, financé par l’argent public, que ses opposants dénoncent comme un gouffre inutile destiné à créer un surplus d’eau pour l’agriculture intensive.

À ce stade, le site n’est encore qu’un immense trou creusé dans le sol, profond d’une quinzaine de mètres et large comme plusieurs terrains de football. À terme, une fois rempli par prélèvement dans les nappes phréatiques, le bassin devra s’intégrer à un réseau de plus de vingt réservoirs répartis entre la Vendée, les Deux-Sèvres et la Charente-Maritime. Pensés à la fin des années 2010, alors que les vagues de chaleur et les sécheresses s’intensifient sur l’ensemble du territoire, ces réservoirs visent à répondre aux besoins en eau — déjà considérables — des grandes exploitations agricoles, en particulier pour la culture du maïs, une plante parmi les plus gourmandes en ressources hydriques.

Autrement dit, ce complexe de réservoirs se présente comme une adaptation au changement climatique — mais une adaptation qui organise l’appropriation d’un bien commun, l’eau, au profit d’intérêts privés. Pour les manifestants, le projet est à la fois imprudent et profondément injuste. À Sainte-Soline, où doit être construite la plus vaste des bassines, ils exigent l’arrêt immédiat des travaux et la remise en état du site. En occupant le réservoir durant une journée, ils souhaitent faire entendre leur opposition par le nombre, défiant l’interdiction préfectorale de manifester.

Alors que le premier cortège traverse un champ en direction du site, les manifestants distinguent des centaines de policiers massés sur la digue qui entoure la bassine. Des milliers d’autres sont déployés en lisière de bois, à couvert. Puis, selon de nombreux témoignages, la police charge sans sommation. Les gaz lacrymogènes se répandent, un brouillard suffocant engloutit le paysage. Des hélicoptères tournent, des véhicules blindés s’avancent au loin. Une pluie de grenades de désencerclement explose dans les airs et aux pieds des manifestants, projetant des éclats de caoutchouc dans toutes les directions.

Un homme a le crâne fracturé, une femme le pied pulvérisé. Plusieurs personnes sont aveuglées, brûlées par les gaz lacrymogènes. Tandis que les blessés hurlent, certains manifestants ripostent. Un groupe de jeunes hommes masqués, vêtus de noir et munis de boucliers de fortune, lance des cocktails Molotov et des pierres arrachées au sol ; d’autres tirent des feux d’artifice en direction des forces de l’ordre. Selon la presse, au moins trois véhicules de police sont incendiés et seize agents sont blessés.

La « bataille de Sainte-Soline », comme elle entre aussitôt dans le langage médiatique, n’est pas un cas isolé. Elle s’inscrit dans plusieurs années de conflit autour de l’extension des réserves d’eau dans l’ouest de la France. En 2022 déjà, une coalition hétéroclite — militants antibassines, petits paysans, écologistes, étudiants, activistes radicaux — se mobilise contre plusieurs projets dans les Deux-Sèvres et en Charente-Maritime. Certains arrachent des pompes et des canalisations, déchirent et incendient les immenses bâches plastiques censées rendre les bassines étanches. D’autres sabotent des réservoirs de nuit, sans être repérés. À Sainte-Soline, les forces de l’ordre s’attendent donc à des actions similaires.

Deux heures plus tard, l’affrontement prend fin. Les manifestants se dispersent, contraints de battre en retraite. Le gouvernement affirme qu’une cinquantaine de policiers ont été blessés, contre seulement sept manifestants pris en charge médicalement. Les organisateurs, eux, recensent près de deux cents blessés parmi les protestataires, dont un homme plongé dans le coma après l’explosion d’une grenade à proximité de sa tête. Jusqu’à cinq mille grenades et cartouches de gaz lacrymogène auraient été tirées. 3 200 policiers, neuf hélicoptères, quatre blindés et quatre canons à eau sont mobilisés, sous la coordination d’un poste de commandement surplombant la zone. L’assaut a été validé par le ministre de l’Intérieur, Gérald Darmanin, qui qualifie ensuite les manifestants d’« écoterroristes ».

Les enquêteurs de l’ONU chargés des droits de l’homme dressent un constat radicalement différent. Ils jugent les violences « alarmantes » et « antidémocratiques », rappelant que la France fait figure d’exception en Europe par l’usage de grenades explosives et de gaz lacrymogènes contre des rassemblements non armés. En réalité, la violence de la répression s’explique par la nature du mouvement antibassines : structuré, déterminé, capable de perturber le complexe agro-industriel — donc de s’attaquer à des intérêts solidement installés.

Des machines dans le jardin

En 2024, je décide de me rendre dans l’ouest de la France pour enquêter sur le mouvement antibassines. Ma première étape me conduit à Amuré, dans les Deux-Sèvres, chez l’une de ses figures de proue : Jean-Jacques Guillet. Septuagénaire et ancien enseignant en menuiserie, il vit dans ce village dont il fut maire pendant dix-neuf ans. Figure locale combative, il s’oppose depuis des décennies aux OGM, bloque un projet d’incinérateur à Niort et fait échouer un site d’enfouissement de déchets nucléaires.

Ce qui le préoccupe, avant tout, c’est la transformation radicale de l’agriculture française depuis l’après-guerre. À ses yeux, c’est l’histoire d’un effacement : celui d’une culture paysanne et de paysages disparus. « Ce n’est pas de l’eau qui coule dans nos veines, c’est la rivière de notre enfance », dit-il. « J’étais un enfant de l’agriculture, j’ai grandi à la ferme, et si aujourd’hui je suis un militant de soixante-treize ans, c’est parce que, sans en avoir pleinement conscience, j’ai été traumatisé dans mon enfance, après la guerre, lorsque ces bouleversements terribles ont eu lieu. »

Si l’on observe des photographies aériennes de la France en 1950, le pays apparaît comme une mosaïque de petites parcelles irrégulières, aux productions diverses — une « nation de trois cents fromages », comme Charles de Gaulle l’a un jour dit. Pendant des siècles, un savoir empirique s’est transmis, fondé sur l’observation des sols, du climat, des cultures et de l’élevage. « On savait qu’on ne fait pas n’importe quoi n’importe où », résume Guillet.

A la suite des privations de la guerre, la France adopte le modèle américain de la monoculture productiviste. Les savoirs traditionnels sont balayés, la diversité sacrifiée sur l’autel de la méchanisation. De vastes régions rurales sont soumises à un régime exigeant des tracteurs coûteux, des quantités considérables de carburants fossiles, d’engrais, d’herbicides et de pesticides, la captation de l’eau pour l’irrigation, et surtout de grands champs ouverts permettant aux machines de circuler sans entrave sur des kilomètres de terrains uniformes. Les campagnes s’ouvrent, les haies disparaissent, les rivières sont redressées pour évacuer l’eau au plus vite.

« Nulle part la transformation agricole n’a été aussi rapide qu’en France », écrit l’historienne de l’université d’Oxford Venus Bivar. « À la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, l’agriculture restait largement un vestige du XIXᵉ siècle ; et pourtant, au milieu des années 1970, la France était devenue le deuxième exportateur mondial de produits agricoles, derrière les États-Unis. »

La domestication des terres pour accueillir les tracteurs fonctionnant au pétrole se révéla dévastatrice pour le bocage de l’ouest de la France — un enchevêtrement de bois, de landes, de champs, de haies et de vergers, sillonné de ruisseaux, de rivières et de canaux anciens. C’est dans ce bocage que Guillet jouait enfant, dans les années 1950. Puis, adolescent, il voit les bulldozers arracher les haies, détourner les cours d’eau, transformer les rivières en un entonnoir géant «dont l’objectif [était] d’évacuer l’eau le plus rapidement possible pour la culture de céréales ».

Dans les années 1970, les céréales deviennent des cultures de rente destinées à l’exportation. Pour s’ouvrir aux marchés mondiaux, les surfaces cultivées s’étendent aux zones les plus riches en

biodiversité et les plus importantes pour le stockage de l’eau : les zones humides — marais, tourbières, deltas fluviaux. Le nouvel idéal, tel que Guillet le décrit, était que « toute la France devienne un jardin. Il ne devait plus y avoir de terres non cultivées ». C’était une marche vers la domestication totale des campagnes, l’aboutissement logique d’un modèle américain qui tirait du sol jusqu’à la dernière goutte de profit. Entre 1960 et 1990, le complexe agro-industriel français a drainé environ 50 % des zones humides dites « non cultivées » du pays.

La destruction des anciens modes de vie signifie aussi l’éviscération d’une classe sociale entière : celle du petit exploitant agricole, ou paysan. En 1945, 36 % de la population adulte travaille dans l’agriculture. Aujourd’hui, ils sont moins de 3 % — autrement dit, la modernisation élimine environ neuf petits exploitants sur dix.

S’ensuivent la concentration et l’agrandissement des exploitations françaises, avec un contrôle de plus en plus concentré entre les mains d’un nombre réduit d’acteurs plus riches, des oligopoles soutenus par des subventions publiques et des allègements fiscaux. Les petits exploitants qui subsistent sont happés par l’engrenage industriel : dépendants de davantage de machines, de traitements chimiques et d’énergies fossiles, ils sont entraînés dans un endettement croissant auprès des banques.

La nature des cultures évolue avec le déclin de la petite paysannerie, et l’une d’entre elles s’impose nettement: le maïs. Introduit, après la guerre, sous forme de variétés hybrides venues des États-Unis, la production de maïs passe d’environ 540 000 tonnes entre 1948 et 1950 à près de 13 millions de tonnes en 2024, faisant du maïs la deuxième céréale du pays. Il est aujourd’hui la troisième céréale la plus exportée de France.

La voix dominante de l’agriculture française — et le principal promoteur du maïs — est la Fédération nationale des syndicats d’exploitants agricoles (FNSEA), fondée en 1946. Bien que ses membres comprennent de nombreux propriétaires agricoles, la FNSEA défend moins les intérêts des travailleurs que ceux de l’industrie agrochimique, des banques finançant le complexe agro-industriel et des plus grandes entreprises agroalimentaires ainsi que de leurs coopératives alliées. Selon le Corporate Europe Observatory (un think tank belge), la FNSEA est une « machine de guerre de l’agriculture industrielle française ». Elle est « bien plus qu’un simple syndicat agricole : elle gère, avec plusieurs branches de l’État français, le système agricole du pays depuis cinquante ans ». La FNSEA promeut la diffusion et l’utilisation de pesticides et d’herbicides toxiques en Europe, et soutient une agriculture céréalière dépendante des produits phytosanitaires comme culture de rente à l’exportation. Le syndicat est le plus ardent défenseur de la construction des bassines face aux sécheresses qui frappent l’ouest de la France. Et, sans surprise, il déploie des moyens extrêmes pour protéger ses intérêts contre toute contestation.

En 2019, la FNSEA s’associe à la Gendarmerie nationale pour créer une unité spéciale de renseignement, baptisée Déméter, du nom de la déesse grecque des moissons. Cette cellule a pour mission de surveiller et de harceler toute personne se livrant à ce que l’on appelle l’« agribashing ». Cette notion englobe des activités criminelles — intrusions sur des sites agricoles, actes de sabotage, etc. — mais aussi des « actions de nature idéologique », y compris de « simples actions symboliques dénigrant le secteur agricole ». Dans les villes, les villages, les préfectures et les brigades rurales, avec l’appui de membres locaux de la FNSEA, les agents de Déméter mettent en place un vaste réseau d’informateurs à l’échelle nationale.

Les tribunaux français jugent ce dispositif illégal et y mettent fin en 2022. Le réseau Déméter pourrait toutefois être encore actif, selon des militants antibassines. Aujourd’hui encore, s’approcher d’une bassine dans les champs de l’ouest de la France peut susciter des réactions d’intimidation. Quelques mois avant notre rencontre, Jean-Jacques Guillet conduit un groupe de cinquante étudiants d’une école d’ingénieurs belge visiter une bassine non loin de chez lui, à Amuré. Des agriculteurs furieux sur leurs tracteurs — qu’il suppose affiliés à la FNSEA — les encerclent sur le site, raconte-t-il ; peu après, des gendarmes arrivent et leur demandent ce qu’ils font là.

Avant l’arrivée des forces de l’ordre, Guillet a le temps d’expliquer aux étudiants la menace que représentent ces réservoirs :

« Ils sont stupéfaits d’apprendre qu’en France, un pays démocratique, où l’on considère l’eau comme un bien public, elle puisse être accaparée par quelques-uns, stockée en plein soleil, sur des bâches noires, à la merci de l’évaporation et des cyanobactéries. On ne peut pas faire plus absurde. Et le pompon, c’est que pour remplir ces bassines, on pompe dans les nappes phréatiques. Si l’on prenait l’eau d’un cours d’eau ou d’un marais, ce ne serait pas beaucoup plus intelligent, mais ce serait au moins moins stupide. Prélever une eau de haute qualité, protégée de la lumière sous nos pieds, pour l’exposer au soleil ? Et le tout avec de l’argent public, avec l’appui d’élus? »

Les rivières au coeur du combat

Les rivières de l’ouest — le Mignon, la Sèvre Niortaise, la Vendée — convergent vers le marais Poitevin, une vaste zone humide d’environ mille kilomètres carrés à l’ouest de la ville de Niort. Façonné par l’homme depuis le Moyen Âge, ce n’est plus, à proprement parler, un marais depuis qu’au VIIème siècle, les moines ont entrepris de construire un réseau complexe de canaux et de petits barrages afin d’assécher certaines portions du delta.

Depuis des siècles, ce marais joue le rôle de réservoir naturel, régulant les crues en stockant les excédents d’eau venus des plateaux. Il devient une merveille du bocage : « l’une des zones humides les plus importantes du continent » de l’Europe, selon un témoignage, « une halte privilégiée pour les oiseaux migrateurs », ainsi qu’un habitat pour la loutre d’Europe.

Parmi ceux qui soignent les blessés lors de la bataille de Sainte-Soline figure un militant massif et barbu de quarante-huit ans, Julien LeGuet, guide batelier et naturaliste autodidacte dans le marais poitevin. Lorsque le premier groupe de bassines est proposé en 2017, LeGuet aide à organiser l’opposition sous la bannière d’un collectif citoyen baptisé Bassines Non Merci, qu’il cofonde cette année-là avec un groupe de militants, d’écologistes et de petits agriculteurs partageant les mêmes convictions. C’est ce collectif qui est à l’origine de la contestation à Sainte-Soline.

Je passe une journée avec LeGuet, à pousser sa barque sur la Sèvre niortaise et dans les canaux qui y sont reliés, au coeur du marais poitevin. Il y a trente ans, lorsqu’il était adolescent, Julien et ses amis s’y baignaient tout l’été. Des anciens racontent qu’il n’y a pas si longtemps — il y a encore soixante-dix ans — on pouvait y boire sans risque. Aujourd’hui l’eau est polluée par les rejets agricoles, à tel point que les habitants déconseillent désormais de s’y baigner.

Pendant une semaine, je suis hébergé par un instituteur à la retraite, Christian, soixante-dix ans, le père de Julien. Il habite dans une vieille maison en pierre pleine de courants d’air où nous discutons du marais tel qu’il était autrefois. « Quand Julien était enfant, il ramassait des grenouilles, des dizaines chaque jour. Elles ont presque toutes disparu. Les libellules aussi : la diversité que nous avions, le bruit qu’elles faisaient, l’eau qui bourdonnait, les grenouilles qui coassaient, la quantité d’insectes… On ne voit plus les mêmes plantes dans l’eau. » Les lentilles d’eau, d’un vert intense, sont une source riche en protéines pour les oiseaux aquatiques et elles offrent un abri aux alevins, aux têtards, poissons et amphibiens. Elles flottent à la surface des zones humides saines et étaient autrefois si abondantes que les canaux du marais prennent le surnom de « Venise verte ». Mais, selon Christian, ces lentilles d’eau dépérissent et disparaissent lentement.

Par un après-midi glacial de novembre, sous un ciel gris, LeGuet manoeuvre sa barque, vêtu d’un sweat-shirt floqué du mot « écoterroriste ». PRécemment, il a découvert une caméra de surveillance braquée directement sur la maison de son père, dissimulée au ras du sol devant le domicile de son voisin. Il suppose qu’elle a été installée par la gendarmerie ou par des agents de la cellule Démeter afin de surveiller les allées et venues de la famille LeGuet. Il sait qu’il est une cible et l’assume pleinement — d’où ce mot provocateur affiché sur son pull, qu’il porte à chacune de nos rencontres. Lorsque je remarque la clarté scintillante de l’eau, il insiste qu’elle est saturée de poisons : au moins deux cents substances chimiques y sont détectées, dont diverses neurotoxines, partage Le Guet en soupirant lourdement.

Le chagrin se mue en colère. Dans un texte publié en 2023, LeGuet s’adresse aux « dirigeants d’entreprises écocidaires » et les « réprésentant-es de la Pieuvre FNSEA et de tous ses tentacules »:

Vous qui vouez un culte à l’extrême Capitalisme, au tout technosolutionnisme, Vous qui êtes prêts à dynamiter les terres nourricières pour y creuser des mégacratères, entourés de mégadigues, étanchéifiés par des océans de bâches noires. Vous pensiez qu’on vous laisserait faire ?

Reste une question : quelle forme doit prendre la résistance ?

En 2021, LeGuet et d’autres représentants de Bassines Non Merci rencontrent les membres d’un collectif d’action environnementale nommé Les Soulèvements de la Terre. Ce groupe est issu d’un mouvement de défense des terres né dans le nord-ouest de la France, à Notre-Dame-des-Landes, où des paysans se battent depuis des décennies pour protéger quatre mille hectares de bocage menacés par un projet de construction d’aéroport.

À partir de 2008, des militants et des anarchistes rejoignent le combat des agriculteurs. Malgré les tentatives répétées des gouvernements successifs pour les expulser — affrontements avec la police, usage de gaz lacrymogènes et passage à tabac — l’aéroport n’est jamais construit et le bocage reste intact. L’occupation de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, surnommée zone à défendre (ZAD) en pied-de-nez au jargon des aménageurs et à leur « zone à développer », fournit le modèle de résistance que les Soulèvements de la Terre reprennent désormais. Après la fondation du mouvement en janvier 2021, des groupes se constituent dans tout le pays, mais leur nombre exact demeure inconnu.

Le manifeste du collectif, Premières Secousses, publié en 2024 — un ouvrage collectif de trois cents pages signé anonymement et édité par la maison parisienne engagée La Fabrique — expose clairement leur vision d’une révolte écologique face à un capitalisme mondial devenu « grisé par sa puissance herculéenne » et ayant laissé le monde naturel en ruines.

« Les terres doivent être defendues », dit le texte. «Contre l’urbanisation qui tend à les recouvrir de béton, à étendre infiniment ses tentacules de routes, de lignes et de flux, qui constelle le territoire de points nodaux et d’entrepôts logistiques. Contre l’extractivisme qui les troue, les transperce et les pollue irrémédiablement au service du capitalisme fossile. Contre le complexe agro-industriel qui les accapare, les empoisonne et voudrait instaurer partout un désert en lieu et place des terroirs paysans…Si le monde brûle d’une atmosphère caniculaire, c’est parce que les infrastructures métropolitaines le consument. Si des milliers d’espèces animales et végétales s’éteignent, c’est d’abord parce que leurs habitats sont détruits. Les terres doivent être défendues contre ce ravage. Nous devons les reprendre, non seulement pour en prendre soin mais aussi pour y vivre et en vivre.»

Les Soulèvements de la Terre proposent trois axes pour la défense des territoires : l’occupation (des lieux, par des collectifs déterminés à ne pas partir), le blocage (des activités industrielles et des voies de circulation — routes, par exemple — qui menacent ces lieux) et le sabotage (des machines et des installations industrielles), qu’ils appellent « désarmement ». Ils s’inscrivent dans une longue tradition européenne de destruction ouvrière des machines et revendiquent notamment l’héritage des luddites anglais, ces tisserands artisans qui, dans les années 1810, se retrouvent privés de travail avec l’arrivée des métiers mécaniques et agissent en sortant masqués la nuit pour briser les machines à coups de marteaux et de gourdins.

À partir de 2021, des cellules d’action directe diffusant des communiqués sous le nom des Soulèvements de la Terre sabotent des cimenteries, des centrales à béton, des carrières de sable, des chantiers de voiries et des engins de construction à travers la France. À la suite de la rencontre estivale avec Bassines Non Merci, la liste des cibles s’étend aux bassines des départements de la Vendée, des Deux-Sèvres et de la Charente-Maritime.

Le mouvement connaît alors une croissance rapide. Des collectifs anarchistes autonomes rejoignent la lutte et deviennent déterminants dans l’élaboration de stratégies défensives, afin de faire face à une police violente et de permettre à d’autres manifestants — pour la plupart terrorisés par l’affrontement — d’exercer plus efficacement leur droit de manifester. Les autonomes acceptent l’affrontement physique avec la police et l’usage d’engins incendiaires, tels que les cocktails Molotov. De manière générale, les représentants des Soulèvements de la Terre n’encouragent ni ne condamnent ces formes de contestation. Tous les insurgés sont les bienvenus, toutes les méthodes sont envisageables, à condition de ne pas franchir une ligne: celle de l’atteinte à la vie humaine. « Nous ne sommes pas des terroristes », me dit LeGuet.

Le mouvement est loin d’être marginal. À la fin de l’année 2021, un vieil adversaire de la FNSEA rejoint la rébellion : la Confédération paysanne, puissant syndicat de petits exploitants fondé dans les années 1980 pour s’opposer au complexe agro-industriel.

Face aux défenseurs de l’eau — paysans, anarchistes et écologistes — s’organisent les patrouilles de la FNSEA : un mélange de « fraternité virile, jumelles, bières, gazeuses et fusils de chasse dans les coffres des utilitaires », selon Premières Secousses. Elles prennent position autour des bassines jugées les plus menacées. Les insurgés les évitent, préférant attaquer les sites à la faveur de la nuit. Les saboteurs publient des communiqués sous des noms teintés de satire et de mystère : ici frappe la « Direction régionale pour la protection de l’eau », là les « Fremen du Marais poitevin ».

À l’approche de la marche de Sainte-Soline, les dégâts infligés aux bassines à travers l’ouest de la France deviennent si importants que les ressources de la FNSEA, du gouvernement, des collectivités locales et des préfectures de police sont mises à rude épreuve par une campagne de sabotage opérant sur des centaines de kilomètres de territoire rural. C’est une opération organisée, anonyme et implacable. « Compte tenu de la multiplicité des cibles potentielles et de l’étendue du territoire à protéger, les forces de l’ordre disponibles ne sont pas en mesure de contenir ces troubles », reconnaît un arrêté préfectoral de 2022.

Bassines mortes

Pour certains membres du mouvement antibassines, la violence du 25 mars 2023 est l’explosion de cette impuissance administrative. L’étrangeté du site de Sainte-Soline tient au fait qu’il n’y a, à ce moment-là, rien à saboter : aucun tuyau, aucune pompe, aucune bâche plastique ne sont encore installés. Pourtant, l’État défend avec férocité un cratère vide, parce qu’il est symboliquement essentiel de tenir le terrain face à des citoyens jugés indisciplinés.

L’ampleur de la violence policière prend une dimension saisissante lorsqu’un responsable gouvernemental fait remarquer, lors d’une audition consacrée à Sainte-Soline, que cinq mille grenades lacrymogènes et explosives sont tirées en une seule journée dans cette enclave rurale — davantage que sur l’ensemble du territoire français en 2018, pourtant marqué par les vastes mobilisations des Gilets jaunes.

Le ministre de l’Intérieur, Gérald Darmanin, tente de justifier l’effusion de sang de la bataille de Sainte-Soline en déclarant que les Soulèvements de la Terre doivent être dissous, et leurs dirigeants et soutiens poursuivis et emprisonnés comme terroristes. Quelle forme doit alors prendre la résistance ?

En déclarant les Soulèvements illégaux et en stigmatisant tous ceux qui travaillent avec le collectif — Bassines Non Merci, Julien LeGuet, Jean-Jacques Guillet et d’autres — le gouvernement ouvre la porte aux arrestations massives d’insurgés écologistes. Gérald Darmanin signe le décret de dissolution en juin 2023 mais, quelques mois plus tard, le Conseil d’État l’annule, estimant que c’est le ministre lui-même qui agit hors du cadre légal.

En novembre, des journalistes de Libération et Mediapart révèlent des images issues de caméras-piétons de gendarmes présents lors de la bataille de Sainte-Soline. On y voit des agents non seulement enfreindre les règles encadrant l’usage des armes contre les manifestants, mais aussi se réjouir, dans l’adrénaline de l’affrontement, d’avoir blessé leurs cibles.

Quelques jours après ma visite à Julien LeGuet dans le marais poitevin, je pars en voiture avec Jean-Jacques Guillet, à bord de sa petite électrique, pour faire le tour de plusieurs sites de construction de bassines dans les Deux-Sèvres. Certains ont été sabotés l’année précédente, d’autres plus récemment, d’autres épargnés.

En empruntant des chemins de terre, nous arrivons devant une bassine, baignée par la lumière de l’après-midi. La digue ceinturée de barbelés émerge d’une mer de tiges de maïs mortes, et, lorsque nous approchons du périmètre, une caméra de surveillance clignote depuis une clôture. « Oups », dit Guillet en me faisant un clin d’oeil. « Ils nous ont repérés. » « Non, mes amis, » dit-il en s’adressant à la caméra, «Nous ne sommes pas là aujourd’hui pour casser ou faire des histoires. Ce sera pour une autre fois. »

Il s’amuse à l’idée de mettre la caméra en pièces à la carabine, puis nous remontons dans sa voiture pour poursuivre la visite. Nous passons devant une pompe alimentant une bassine qui a été mise hors service à plusieurs reprises. Quelqu’un, explique-t-il, s’acharne sur cette pompe encore et encore, en lui arrachant ses entrailles. « C’est vraiment terrible », dit Guillet en souriant d’un air malicieux.

Quelques jours plus tôt, Guillet et moi avons participé à une marche d’environ mille personnes rassemblées dans le brouillard matinal du village de Saint-Sauvant, sur les hauteurs, à une cinquantaine de kilomètres à l’est du marais poitevin, non loin du champ de bataille de Sainte-Soline.

L’objectif est de partir du village en cortège et de traverser la campagne par des routes secondaires jusqu’au site prévu pour la future bassine de Saint-Sauvant, encore à l’état de projet. Un nombre important de policiers — des dizaines, dit-on — se seraient retranchés dans les forêts bordant l’itinéraire. Personne ne sait à quoi s’attendre. Une attaque est possible, pour quelque raison que l’État juge appropriée. Peut-être, au contraire, la marche se déroulera-t-elle sans incident.

L’alliance entre les paysans, Bassines Non Merci et les militants de l’action directe des Soulèvements de la Terre porte ses fruits. Dans les Deux-Sèvres, les projets de bassines sont à l’arrêt et, selon LeGuet, en 2025, les autorités du département de la Vienne annoncent l’abandon de quarante et une autres bassines prévues. Certains projets sont « morts dans l’oeuf », me dit-il, « abandonnés sans qu’on le sache, parce que les élus ont la trouille de voir un “Sainte-Soline” chez eux ».

Saisies par des associations de protection de la nature, de pêcheurs et d’autres collectifs environnementaux, les juridictions françaises interviennent pour annuler ou retarder plusieurs projets, les jugeant contraires à diverses législations, notamment celles protégeant la qualité de l’eau et la faune. La liste des bassines contestées inclut Sainte-Soline elle-même : en décembre 2024, une décision de justice estime que sa construction menace l’habitat d’une espèce d’oiseau en danger.

Dans le même temps, les bassines, en tant que soutien public au secteur agro alimentaire, suscitent un rejet croissant à travers la France, en grande partie à cause de la mauvaise publicité engendrée par la rébellion. Même si la violence de Sainte-Soline a dissuadé certains de manifester dans les champs, d’autres ont ouvert leur portefeuille : en 2024, une collecte de fonds en faveur de Bassines Non Merci rapporte une somme importante, selon Jean-Jacques Guillet (qui n’en précise pas le montant) et près de deux cents nouveaux groupes des Soulèvements de la Terre voient le jour en France, en Belgique et en Suisse.

Dans certains cas cependant, le gouvernement passe outre les décisions de justice et poursuit la construction de bassines. « Nous sommes alors dans une sorte d’État mafieux. La loi a parlé, le gouvernement n’écoute pas », me dit Guillet. Présent à Sainte-Soline, où il est pris pour cible, il marche de nouveau ce jour-là à Saint-Sauvant. L’amertume et la douleur des événements survenus un an et demi plus tôt ne disparaissent pas, et nombre de participants étaient présents lors de la bataille, ont vu les blessés et entendu leurs cris.

Julien LeGuet est lui aussi de la marche. Ce matin-là, chez son père, il enchaîne cigarettes et cafés. Il paraît épuisé, comme s’il avait dormi dans un fossé, et s’inquiète du déroulement de la journée. Il s’attend au pire.

Nous partons peu après midi. Le cortège, long d’environ un kilomètre, s’étire sur des chemins boueux à travers d’immenses champs de maïs. On chante, on scande des slogans, des haut-parleurs diffusent de la musique, et les manifestants veulent raconter leur histoire. Je rencontre une femme d’une trentaine d’années, Laury Gingreau, copropriétaire d’une ferme coopérative où, avec ses associés, elle plante ces dernières années trois mille arbres de soixante espèces différentes, dans le but de réensauvager le paysage. Gazée à Sainte-Soline, elle me dit : « C’est comme la guerre. » Membre de Bassines Non Merci depuis sa création en 2017, elle n’a aucune intention de reculer.

Je fais également la connaissance de Kate, étudiante en philosophie de vingt et un ans, qui souhaite rester anonyme. Pour elle, la lutte contre les bassines oppose « l’État-nation aux gens qui vivent sur la terre ». « C’est une question de modes de vie sacrifiés au nom du progrès — c’est-à-dire le colonialisme, l’empire, le pouvoir des entreprises. » Elle marche parce qu’elle se dit « du côté de ceux qui habitent la terre ».

Nous atteignons le site de la future bassine de Saint-Sauvant. À des kilomètres à la ronde, hormis quelques petits bois épars çà et là, le paysage n’est plus qu’un champ de maïs fauché à la machine, craquant sous les pas. De jeunes enfants, portant des seaux remplis de graines — pois, blé et autres céréales — ensemencent les champs avec leurs parents, en un geste de protestation contre la monoculture. Deux paysans prennent la parole pour évoquer la pénurie d’eau.

LeGuet entraîne la foule dans un chant : « No bassaran ! », clin d’oeil ironique au « No pasarán ! » de la guerre civile espagnole. Un député de l’Assemblée nationale, ceint de l’écharpe tricolore, dénonce à son tour l’industrie agricole. Puis une douzaine de femmes et d’hommes, marteaux et clous en main, entreprennent de construire un observatoire à oiseaux en rondins bruts, en hommage à l’outarde canepetière, espèce nicheuse au sol menacée d’extinction dans l’ouest de la France du fait de la surexploitation de son habitat.

La marche se déroule sans incident majeur, même si, à un moment, une jeune femme partie uriner dans un bosquet longeant le parcours fait surgir un groupe de gendarmes en tenue antiémeute, dissimulés dans les fourrés. Les gendarmes lui ordonnent « d’aller pisser ailleurs ». Un drone suit la foule à basse altitude dans le brouillard. Au loin, des policiers munis de téléobjectifs prennent des photos. Il est raisonnable de penser que ces images sont conservées dans des bases de données, prêtes à être utilisées en vertu de futures lois pour emprisonner les prétendus écoterroristes — c’est-à-dire tous ceux qui défendent la terre contre l’avancée de la machine capitaliste.

The defining feature of Western representative democracy today is that the individuals we elect don’t represent anything other than monied interests and corporate power. We know this from the daily news, from our gut sense, from watching time and again our electeds act in ways contrary to the public interest.

Aristotle predicted this eventuality in the 4^th century BC: Democratic elections, he warned, would invariably lead to oligarchy, the rule of the few, because elections tend to favor candidates from the ranks of the elite, who bring to bear against the electorate the weapon of their personal wealth and connections to other elites.

During the golden age of Athenian democracy, from the 6^th century BC following the reforms of the great lawgiver Solon to the final decades of the 4^th century, representatives to run the city-state in Athens were chosen not by election but by lottery, a process called sortition, in which rich and poor alike were called at random to serve in citizen assemblies and in jury-courts.

This was consecrated as rule by the demos, and it was during this period of vigorous direct democracy, with the freedom it afforded in an open field of competing ideas, that Greek culture laid the foundations of Western politics, philosophy, logic, mathematics, theatre, poetry, and much else.

Would that we had selection by lottery today to govern society.

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The majority of the American public wants socialized medicine and would probably enact it if they ran an empowered citizen assembly in lieu of the overlords in Congress. Our electeds, of course, continue instead with a market-based system designed to maximize profits, producing rotten outcomes.

Some 86 percent of Americans would prohibit stock-trading by members of Congress, and by the president, vice-president, and Supreme Court justices. A vast majority supports government negotiating down the prices of prescription drugs. Roughly eight in ten Americans support age caps and term limits for electeds in Congress as our slobbering gerontocracy races in its wheelchair to the cliff.

Does Congress listen to the people on any of these matters? Of course not.

We have empirical evidence that representative democracy in the United States is a sham. A landmark 2014 study into the massive non-representation in our so-called democratic republic, conducted by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, political scientists at Princeton and Northwestern universities, respectively, analyzed 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 to parse the influence on government exerted by average citizens, economic elites, and organized interest groups.

Gilens and Page found that average citizens have a “near-zero, statistically non-significant impact” on public policy and that policy outcomes are overwhelmingly determined by economic elites. There is occasionally an illusion of representation, as when average citizens get their preferred outcome – but only because their interests happen to align with what elites already want.

So what do you do when the citizenry demands change and the government carries on with business as usual?

In Canada, on the matter of war and mass killing in the Occupied Territories and the wonderful profits tied to it, more than half of the citizens now oppose arming Israel for genocide. Yet the Carney government, not dissimilar to previous administrations, ignores the people and lets the weapons flow.

Last week, hundreds of Canadians, in what’s being called a “people’s arms embargo,” took to the streets to put suppliers for notorious Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems on notice: divest or face sustained public pressure.

On August 13, activists from the Arms Embargo Now coalition picketed and leafletted outside industrial facilities from British Columbia to Newfoundland, targeting more than forty companies identified as logistics partners to Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons firm and one that boasts of battle-testing its products in the Gazan genocide.

The activists also launched a pressure campaign aimed at senior executives at dozens of the targeted companies, bombarding them with emails. The message: Cut ties with Elbit now. (Arms Embargo Now will appear to some observers as an exercise in extreme moderation. Last autumn, I wrote for Drop Site News about the successes of the UK group Palestine Action’s campaign of sabotage, vandalism and destruction of Elbit manufacturing sites in the UK, for whom an email campaign is small beer.)

One of the companies is TTM Technologies, in Ontario, which has shipped millions of dollars in circuit boards to Elbit for use in precision strike munitions.

“Providing circuit boards for Elbit’s Lizard laser-guidance kits isn’t some distant or neutral business relationship,” said Haneen Ismail, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement and Arms Embargo Now. “Elbit’s suppliers in Canada operate largely outside of public scrutiny while providing the components and technology it relies on. We are ending that anonymity.”

The movement has seen significant victories. Last week, Montreal-based Elbit supplier Apollo Microwaves announced it ended its contract with the company after organizers with Arms Embargo Now pressed it to do so. And after campaigners targeted Scotiabank, Canada’s third-largest commercial bank and once Elbit’s largest foreign shareholder, it pulled its $500 million investment earlier this year. Elbit’s CEO complained to the Israeli press that the divestment was the work of the damned Canadian people.

“This is about accountability,” says Ismail. “If you help Elbit function, you are complicit in its crimes, and we will continue to expose those relationships.”

These people aren’t waiting for the government to act, because the government doesn’t care what they think and has made clear it won’t move. They’re hitting the pressure points to interrupt real-time supply chains – what rule by the demos looks like.

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Note to readers: Below is a piece I wrote for Harper’s in 2013, a remarkably prescient look at what will happen to the Colorado River Compact as epic drought causes the hydraulic empire of the American Southwest to falter and, at long last, collapse. As the New York Times reported yesterday, we are now in the first stages of the collapse, right on time in 2026, as predicted seventeen years ago by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who I interviewed for the story. From the Times: “Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir and a vital source of water for more than 25 million people across the Southwest, has dwindled to its lowest levels ever as the region struggles through a punishing drought.”

If the water drops any further, the reservoir will hit what’s called dead pool, at which point no more water flows downstream. “That would be disastrous for the lower basin states, cutting off supplies to critical farmland, Native American tribes and cities like Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix.”

Here’s the original draft of my Harper’s piece, which appeared in shorter form in the magazine under the title “Razing Arizona: Will drought destroy the Southwest?”

It was a river of drought, low enough that we could walk alongside the rafts, our feet sinking in the silky bottom. We had put in near Moab, Utah, at the mouth of Meander Canyon, where the Colorado River takes a break from racing out of the Rocky Mountains. There would be no worry about rapids for the next 40 miles, until Cataract Canyon, a stretch of whitewater that has a penchant for flipping boats and killing boatmen. Occasionally the rafts caught on sandbars and spun like lily pads, and we rallied around them in the water and pushed under the August sun. Where the flow deepened to the waist, a big-toothed writer named Bill deBuys, of New Mexico, who was once shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for his book River of Traps, fancied he could jog in the weightlessness of the water. All but one of our party — the trip leader, John Weisheit, a droopy-shouldered, slow-talking Moab river runner who had given up alcohol — popped cold beers on ice. All but Weisheit abandoned the boats, escaping the terrible heat as our crafts drifted.

The water was warm as a bath, and soft on the skin, and it shone lusty red from a brief summer monsoon days earlier that churned it with the clay of flash flood. The CEO of Denver Water, a lawyer named Jim Lochhead, efficient and fit though sometimes jittery, with a mocking sense of humor and a habit of gnawing his cuticles, drank Budweiser and dunked his head. “I claim this river for Denver Water and the verdant Front Range,” he shouted. A beaver slapped tail, kerplunked homeward, and a blue heron flew away. The general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, a Pepperdine-trained nuclear engineer named Eric Kuhn, who had the endearing habit of inserting the word okay into his sentences, recited water statistics: historic flow, current flow, and the level of flow at which the Southwest would have to radically alter its relationship to the river. “The quest for certainty,” he said, “is what the whole fight for this river will be about, okay.”

DeBuys, floating on his back, thought that matters were quite certain, that our thirst had fatally outstripped natural flow, that under the regime of climate change the situation could only worsen. The Southwest, he assured, was doomed as currently configured. It was the fastest growing region in America, engine of roughly 24 percent of GDP, home to vast populations aggregated mostly in cities dependent on a single river’s tenuous supply. Its people, its farms, its industries demanded more water than the river could give.

DeBuys had recently published a book about climate change in the Southwest. It was called A Great Aridness. Arguably the great aridness was already in our midst. Over the previous decade, the Colorado River had experienced its lowest flows in a paleohydrologic record going back to 800 AD. During 2012, the hottest year on record in the contiguous United States, when 60 percent of the country suffered extreme drought, wildfires of unprecedented size and fury had swept across the pine forests of New Mexico and Colorado. DeBuys did not envy Kuhn and Lochhead. As members of the water bureaucracy that encompassed seven states, collectively the Colorado basin, they would have to manage these extremes amid bickering governments which from the earliest days of Euro-American settlement had each claimed a piece of the river.

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Before lunch, Weisheit, harrumphing that it was time to see some ruins that would inform the conversation, tied the rafts at a narrow beach lined with tamarisk trees. We gathered water bottles, soaked our shirts, cocked our hats, and hiked to a little granary for the storing of maize, its sandstone blocks mortared with river mud around the year 1250 AD. The Anasazi people, “the ancient ones” in Navajo, ancestors of the scattered Puebloan tribes of the arid lands, thrived on the Colorado Plateau for hundreds of years prior to their collapse circa 1300, when the desert heated up and the rain stopped falling. They left tiered cities, and lonely outposts, and lookout towers, and kivas, and irrigation ditches, and petroglyphs of their ghostly gods and the antlered creatures they hunted, and modest granaries such as the one before us. Drought had sent an entire people adrift in the exodus known as the Great Abandonment. In some villages the social order collapsed to the extent that the natives ate each other.

**

Our passage on the river traced, in part, the journey of explorer John Wesley Powell, a self-taught geologist who lost his right arm to a musket ball at the Battle of Shiloh and came West after the war to find his way into “the Great Unknown.” In the spring of 1869, Powell set out on the Green River in Wyoming with eight men in four wooden dories, bound for the confluence of the Green and the Colorado Rivers, thence to survey and name the major canyons of the Colorado where it passed, swollen and white, through Utah and Arizona. After sixty-nine days and 900 river miles, malnourished from a diet of coffee and spoiled flour, enduring the extremes of heat and cold, flash flood, constant wet, broken oars, leaky boats, threatened mutinies, countless rapids run in a mad dash or portaged in hard toil, and facing always the uncertainty of success, the Colorado River Exploring Expedition emerged out of the Grand Canyon at the mouth of the Virgin River. They had been given up for dead.

Powell completed a second boat expedition through the canyons in 1871, published a best-selling account, and was acclaimed a national hero, ranked alongside James Fremont and Merriwether Lewis. He parlayed his fame to secure from Congress funding for an irrigation survey of the American desert, and took over the directorship of the U.S. Geological Survey, becoming in his time the premier expert —ethnologist, geographer, hydrologist, naturalist — to advise the federal government on how most efficiently to settle the arid lands of the West.

He proposed a radical reform: states and territories would be broken up and reconstituted as hundreds of bioregions, locally controlled, small in scale, their boundaries determined by “hydrographic basins.” His irrigation survey would map these watershed units and provide “an accumulation of facts for the people” so they might cooperate in scarcity. In place of the solitary homesteader, the frenzy of the land grab, the narrowness of competition, Powell envisioned western settlement based on the recognition of the limits of carrying capacity. He proposed, most unthinkably, that watersheds be held as common property, for water in arid country was power, and whosoever controlled the water monopolized the land to be irrigated for hundreds of miles around. “Hold the waters in the hands of the people,” he said. Proceed otherwise, and “evils will result therefrom that generations may not be able to correct.”

Powell’s land reforms, wrote biographer Wallace Stegner, were “so sober as to seem calamitous.” He was attempting to dissolve a half-century of legislation — the Northwest Ordinances, the Preemption Act, the Homestead Act, the Timber Culture Act, the Desert Land Act — that had been written for the landless migrant heading West but mostly provided the loopholes for corporate fraud and takeover of the public domain by ranching, mining, timber and railroad companies. The baronial interests organized to protect their investments. Powell accordingly was denounced in Congress as a “revolutionist,” a “charlatan in science and intermeddler in affairs” who was throwing “insurmountable obstacles in the way of the settlement of the public domain.” Sen. William Stewart of Nevada, lawyer, ex-miner, land speculator, friend of the railroads and the cattlemen, launched “a campaign of vilification and innuendo” to discredit him. The booster editorialists in growing Western cities avowed there was no scarcity, never had been and never would be: There was in fact more water every year with every new farm established. Plant grain and trees and the foliage would shake water from the skies, they said, citing quack studies.

Powell’s irrigation survey was defunded before he could complete it. By 1893, when he was invited to speak at the second International Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles, he could conclude that his vision of a West built to carrying capacity would not be realized. Three times as much land as could be irrigated with available supplies had already been parceled out from the public domain. The delegates who gathered in the city’s Grand Opera House called for more. “O glorious land,” sang a choir brought in as entertainment, “where fruits purple, crimson, and golden roll forth from plenty’s horn.” Disgusted at the proceedings, the one-armed veteran stood to make his last public statement on the settlement of the West. “I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands.” The cornucopians, aghast, hooted and howled, booed and hissed, and Powell departed the conference in a deep funk. Nine years later, he was dead.

**

Two days after we stopped to meditate on the ruins of the Anasazi, we landed below the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, under thousand-foot walls, at a white sand beach where the plan was to stay for two nights. We unloaded in a bucket brigade our camp chairs, a four-burner propane stove, and a galley kitchen of five folding tables that we planted in the sand. We had sleeping pads the size of toboggans, each of us a separate tent, 15 pounds of fresh meat, cucumbers and onions and tomatoes and heads of lettuce, 200 cans of beers, 150 cans of soda and sparkling water, lime juice for cocktails, bottles of rum, whiskey, gin, and vodka, cartons of sweet snacks and chocolaty desserts, and, for the evening’s penultimate relaxation, an old military surplus ammunition can as toilet, with a comfy if battered seat fixed atop it.

Lochhead forgot that he was the CEO of anything, crossing the river to the far bank and back, doing a thrifty Australian crawl, emerging with a hoot and cry. We discussed our shits on the ammo can. Jeff Nichols, a professor of history at Westminster College who was along for the ride, was glad he wasn’t teaching undergrads. DeBuys sat snug in his camp chair, deeply pleased at the honking of geese that sounded on the cliffs. The sun fell behind the canyon rim, and the oppressive white light of day softened, sweetened, turned pink and umber and buff on the sandstone walls. A canyon wren sang its liquid glissando. We were on the precipice of Cataract Canyon, and beyond the wren’s call we heard the echo of the rapids. Someone brought out the hard liquor. I learned that river managers in the west are pejoratively referred to as water buffaloes. Kuhn and Lochhead, henceforth our buffaloes, did not mind.

DeBuys asked the party what we saw in the water that carried us. “Kidneys,” said Lochhead, who was urinating into it. The river crawled away with the foamy patch. Kuhn thought a moment. “Uncertainty,” he said.

“I see property going down to its owners,” said deBuys. “Every drop is spoken for.”

Weisheit called us quietly to the kitchen, and together we divided up the duties, chopping onions and preparing meat and sucking at the liquor bottles. I asked Weisheit what he saw in the water. He paused, and sighed. “Despair. That’s what I say when I see something dying.”

After thirty years of working for Utah outfitters on the river, Weisheit had quit in disgust. The guide business, he concluded, was peopled with “drunks who didn’t give a shit about the river.” He went on to found, in 2000, the non-profit Living Rivers, and, in 2002, a related coalition of activists called Colorado Riverkeeper. He had read John Wesley Powell, and had rafted, in 1996, for more than a hundred consecutive days on the Green and Colorado Rivers, hewing to Powell’s whitewater trail. He had run Cataract Canyon at least 350 times, gotten married in Cataract Canyon, taken his honeymoon in Cataract Canyon, co-authored a book about the history of the river in Cataract Canyon, and, as director of Living Rivers, been a plaintiff in multiple lawsuits against the federal government over its environmental stewardship of Cataract and the water downriver in the Grand Canyon. He lost every suit.

We ate, and night fell, and the clear sky was laid with stars. We boozed more. Kuhn and Lochhead, for entertainment, offered us a history of the division of the water into property. It began with the National Reclamation Act of 1902, the year of Powell’s death. The act established the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, whose purpose was to industrialize, on a scale unimaginable to Powell, in a centralized form of governance that Powell would have decried, the rivers of the arid lands. The Bureau of Reclamation, its slogan “total use for greater wealth,” would now parcel out the flow of water in the Southwest, establishing a degree of certainty previously unknown among the Colorado’s users: Reclamation’s vast dams and reservoirs would control the river’s maddening floods and provide security of supply during drought. In 1922, urged along by the federal government, representatives of the basin states — the upper basin of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, the lower basin of California, Nevada, and Arizona — arrived after much bickering and antagonism at an agreement for hydraulic management of the region. This was the Colorado River Compact.

The compact of 1922 was the product of, and an attempt to mitigate, a peculiarly American system of property rights to water expressed in the doctrine of prior appropriation. The person who first made “beneficial use” of a stream or river had first right to it, senior to all subsequent users. Qui prior est in tempore, went the maxim, potior est in jure. Under this doctrine, the earliest users of the Colorado River, notably California, could legally establish a monopoly over regional water supply, even though 70 percent of the river’s water came from a single state, Colorado. The continual expansion of California’s agricultural sector — Colorado River water had been used as early as the 1890s to irrigate the Imperial Valley, where the population increased 350 percent between 1910 and 1930 — along with the growing thirst of its southern coastal cities, was claiming the water supply of the other basin states. California, first in time and strongest in right, had to be stopped: Hence the compact.

The agreement’s central flaw was its assumption that the Colorado held more water than it really did. The annual flow estimated in 1922 was 17 to 18 million acre-feet. (An acre-foot is the amount of water required to cover an acre of land a foot deep and is equivalent to 325,851 gallons, enough to supply the home of a modern family of four for a year.) The negotiators for the upper basin guaranteed that their states would deliver to the lower basin 75 million acre-feet over any ten-year period, which was less than half the expected flow. By the 1930s, however, hydrologists had concluded that the earlier estimate was too high. The latest estimate, determined by studying ancient tree rings, puts the historic average flow of the river at just 14 million acre-feet. Thus the Colorado from the moment of its political division had been overallocated.

By the time Kuhn and Lochhead got into the business of water management in the 1980s — Kuhn started as an engineer with the Colorado River Water Conservation District; Lochhead was a water rights lawyer for the state of Colorado — the region remained in the grip of its six-decade-old hallucination of abundance. Water buffaloes who pointed out the evidence of the river’s periodic stinginess were ignored or derided. The Colorado was reckoned simply as a tap always turned to maximum flow. The drought that catalyzed the Dust Bowl, when flow dropped to 12.7 million acre-feet, had ended with record snowpack in the Rockies that recharged the river, and so, too, had the droughts of the 1950s and the 1970s. The 1980s and 1990s were lavishly wet decades, the Colorado producing all time highs of 24 million acre-feet in 1983 and 25 million in 1994, when huge snows fell in the mountains. Then, after 1999, dry air returned, and for the next fourteen years, despite two exceptional winters of recharge, drought hung over the Southwest. [As most readers know, in 2026 it shows no sign of ending.]

The states in the interim had moved no further toward trusting each other. Our buffaloes, upper basin men, naturally did not hesitate to name the lower basin as the problem child of the Colorado River. The lower basin, with its sprawling cities, its industrial farms, had always been blind to limits. “The lower basin,” Kuhn told me, “is now overusing its share of the Colorado River by as much as two and a half million acre-feet a year. The only reason they can do this is because the upper basin isn’t using this water—we use four million a year—and we give it to them. It’s not sustainable.”

Kuhn and Lochhead agreed that a solution would not come from direct confrontation. Renegotiating the compact, questioning the pledges of property that had been law for almost a century, would lead to chaos. Arizona v. California, one of the longest and most expensive cases in the history of the Supreme Court — filed in 1952, decided in 1963, requiring the services of fifty lawyers and two court-appointed special masters, costing five million dollars in legal fees, producing two years of formal hearings, evidence from 340 witnesses, and thousands of pages of testimony — provided a glimpse of this nightmare. Though the Supreme Court affirmed that Arizona was owed 2.8 million acre-feet annually, the judgment stipulated that Arizona’s rights, under the doctrine of prior appropriation, would remain junior to California’s, which suggested that, in an apocalyptic drought scenario, the car washes in Los Angeles flow unabated while Phoenicians have no water to drink. California’s Imperial Irrigation District, among all entities in the basin, maintained the largest single call on river supply, some four million acre-feet. The upper basin could of course renege on its delivery obligation, if it wished to start a civil war. “Renegotiation of the compact is politically impossible,” said Lochhead. Kuhn described it as “a stalemate.” Both believed, however, that the rational decision-makers would muddle through the mess created by the compact so long as there was a “continuation of personalities,” an established field of technocrats who knew and trusted each other even if the political leadership was at odds. Stalemate had the benefit of stability.

**

In ancient arid lands where a river flowed as the sole source of plenty, in pharaonic Egypt and in Mesopotamia, for example, irrigation societies arose that were remarkably uniform in structure: governed under the despotic authority of a divinely appointed regent, served by masses of laborers marshaled on an unprecedented scale to build the ditches, canals, aqueducts, embankments, and irrigation networks that would draw an agricultural surplus out of the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, and, on a lesser scale in China, the Yellow River. Karl Wittfogel, who in 1957 published his theory of hydraulic empires, observed that this “Oriental despotism,” as he termed it, was climatically determined. Aridity demanded absolutist government, along with an agro-hydraulic managerial class tasked with record-keeping, accountancy, organization of manpower, communications and intelligence, and, eventually, urban expansion that produced the colossalism of the pyramid and the ziggurat. “Jealously defending their monopoly of political organization,” wrote Wittfogel, the hydraulic bureaucracy developed water dynasties within their ranks. A mature hydraulic empire was thus highly resistant to change, working only “towards the reproduction of the existing order, towards its stagnation.” “And given time,” said Wittfogel, “stagnation results in stereotyped repetition [or] outright retrogression.” The managerial class could only do more of the same—until, as in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, the price of doing the same, irrigating to the point that mineral salts killed the soil and the crops failed, was self-destruction.

No hydraulic civilization in history has rivaled that of the American West under the Bureau of Reclamation. After 1922, the monuments of empire were fastened on the Colorado River, which was declared “the American Nile,” the “Mother of an Occidental Egypt.” The Colorado, Donald Worster wrote in Rivers of Empire, was now “a part of nature that had died and been reborn as money.” Hoover Dam, completed in 1935, then the largest dam ever constructed, impounded 28 million acre-feet in Lake Mead and generated hydro-electricity for sale mostly in California (the revenues helped defray the cost of construction). Parker Dam, completed in 1938, impounded Lake Havasu on the California-Arizona border, the dam’s generators pushing water through the Colorado River Aqueduct to the Metropolitan Water District, which serves southern California from Ventura to San Diego. The All-American Canal, completed in 1942, feeds the multi-billion-dollar farms of the Imperial Irrigation District, along with its main ancillaries, the Coachella Irrigation District and the Palo Verde Irrigation District. Glen Canyon Dam, completed in 1963, the second most important subjugation of the river, created a 27 million-acre-foot reservoir, Lake Powell.

The system was interlocking and interdependent: Mead depended on outflows from Powell; Havasu and the web of canals and aqueducts downriver of it depended on outflows from Mead. (Between Lake Powell and Lake Mead was an obstacle called Grand Canyon National Park, part of which Reclamation engineers also had once hoped to flood). Reclamation’s most ambitious and expensive hydraulic achievement was a 336-mile pipeline and aqueduct, the Central Arizona Project, which runs east into Arizona from Lake Havasu. The Central Arizona Project allowed for the breakneck expansion of Phoenix and Tucson.

Today more than a hundred dams large and small line the Colorado’s main stem and its tributaries; total reservoir storage amounts to roughly four times the average annual natural flow. Climate models agree that by 2026 the average flow of the Colorado will drop as much as thirty percent, or below eleven million acre-feet. Some models suggest there will be a further reduction in annual flow to seven million acre-feet after 2035. [Update: the flow for 2026 will likely top out at 3.5 maf, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, though the average since 2020 has hovered around 10 maf.]

Studies of the effect of climate change on Lake Mead, issued in 2008 and 2009 by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, concluded that without massively curtailed water usage Mead had a fifty percent chance of declining to “dead pool” by 2026—dead pool being the height above sea level, 895 feet, when the reservoir, officially full at 1,219 feet, has dropped below the lowest outlet of Hoover Dam. With dead pool, Colorado water deliveries to millions of people in California, millions more in Arizona, and millions of acres of farmland in both states cease. Hydroelectric production at the dam, providing power to more than a million consumers, will have gone dead at 950 feet, though below 1,035 feet production will have already dropped by up to seventy percent. [Update: As of today, August 10, 2026, Lake Mead’s water level sits at 1,040.3 feet.]

The lead author of the Scripps reports, Tim Barnett, a research marine physicist, presented his findings in numerous meetings of water managers and elected leaders, including a 2009 conference of the mayors of California’s ten largest cities. The Colorado supplied forty million people, the majority of them in cities. That number was projected almost to double by 2060. “The mayors got the bottom line that the Colorado was exhaustible,” Barnett told me. “They asked, What can we do about this? I said cut down development, stop growing so fast, so that we won’t have as many people needing water. Their reaction was like getting a series of electric shocks. I got a lecture about living and dying in San Jose, from the mayor, who said that we have no right to tell people where they want to live, and that if someone wants to live and die in San Jose then by god we’ll find the water. It’s been this way for a hundred years. I don’t see a chance at reasoned solutions.”

The goal of finding the water, described in technical parlance as “river augmentation,” had inspired the water management bureaucracy to reproduce the existing order, but on a magnitude that was prohibitively expensive, politically fraught, and occasionally demented. Water was to be diverted in continent-spanning pipelines from the Yukon and the Tanana and the Susitna rivers in Alaska, from the Churchill, the Slave, the Peace rivers in Canada. Nuclear-powered desalination plants on the California coast would transform the ocean into something drinkable. Icebergs out of the Arctic, along with freshwater from the mouth of the Columbia River, would be barged in gigantic collapsible bladders to the southern California ports. Even the Great Lakes had been considered for transfer.

**

On the morning of the fourth day, before the heat set in, the party mustered out of camp to fill backpacks with water and food for a hike to the mesa rim. The trail switchbacked up the cliffs, rising a thousand feet above the river into a labyrinth of eroded stone towers. The towers, monstrous in size and shape, were colored in bands of vanilla and pink and orange, and lorded over hundreds of miles of red desert, “a wilderness of rocks,” as Powell had described, “deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles, and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds.” By 1 pm, our temperature gauge registered 111 degrees F in the sun. Across this sere landscape, save where our boats waited, there was not a significant source of water.

The party split up. Weisheit and I sat alone in the shade of the sentinel hoodoos. We drank like misers from our canteens, and took off our shoes, and toed the hot sand. I held my breath and heard nothing—even the breeze lay down in the heat. Weisheit talked about geologic time. He described for me the waves of climate change that had created the material of the canyon country: how ancient inland seas and deserts in succession, starting 300 million years ago, had deposited the iron-rich red beds of silt and mud and sand that layered one atop the other through the Permian, the Triassic, the Jurassic; how 65 million years ago the Laramide Orogeny lifted the region, creating the Rocky Mountains and the Colorado Plateau, and in this uplift the rivers tilted, cutting ever deeper; how millions of years of erosion followed, a mile of sediment was carried off by the rivers and their tributaries, by the rain and snow, by ice ages melted, water always sculpting the canyonlands, sculpting still, in even the lightest rain, the stone we sat on.

I asked Weisheit about his boyhood in Phoenix in the 1950s. It was a nice little town of orange groves, he had a paper route on his bicycle, and the weather got cold enough that on winter mornings there was frost on the ground. The groves were replaced by subdivisions in the mid-60s. That cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas—“Cities of death,” he called them—had been allowed to grow so big sticking their straws in the Colorado River was an affront to commonsense, to science, to nature itself. “These cities will someday die from drought, and they deserve to die,” he said. “It happened to the Anasazi. It will happen to Phoenix.”

His mother, father, sisters, brothers, cousins all still lived in Phoenix. His brothers ran an industrial refrigeration business and were thriving. “They have a pool, a hot tub, a TV above the bathtub. The truth is we’re giving water to wasteful, consumptive people in the lower basin. They want more freeways, more houses, more pools, more climate-controlled environments, more casinos in Vegas. How much more do they want? They’re water-skiing in Palm Springs, for christ’s sake, in the middle of the fucking Mojave Desert. And our buffaloes tell us everything is going to be fine.”

The next day, refreshed in the water, leaning on his oars, Weisheit was in a better mood. He jousted with Kuhn and Lochhead over his proposal to decommission Glen Canyon Dam — he suggested blowing it up. This would free the river to flow unobstructed into the Grand Canyon. Never happen, said the buffaloes. He suggested, as Barnett had, a moratorium on population growth in the basin. DeBuys, listening on our boat, quoted the writer Edward Abbey. “Continuous growth,” he said, “is the ideology of the cancer cell.” The buffaloes said this was delusional thinking.

“Why?” asked Weisheit.

“Why what?” replied Lochhead.

“Grow! So we can all live like a cancer?”

“Look, Denver is working on being a vibrant urban core,” Lochhead shot back. “The problem is that there are 40 to 50 suburban entities around Denver, and we’re providing water, on perpetual contract, to around half of them. The developers, the real estate people, are going to build, and people are going to buy. Our system is based on that. As a general matter, utilities exist to serve future growth. To keep it going, but not to say, ‘Okay, we’re done.’” He was admitting, in other words, that the buffalo is a powerless creature. “I hate it,” said Lochhead, “but that’s the reality. We need people like you advocating for a different approach.”

“People like you,” said Weisheit, “laugh at me.”

Lochhead argued that agriculture was the true glutton of the Southwest. Denver Water was serving 25 percent of the population in the state of Colorado but using only 4 percent of the state’s surface water, using in fact less water every year its number of customers increased. Roughly ninety percent of all water diversions from the river went to the irrigation of land. This was highly remunerative. Colorado River water produced 15 percent of the nation’s crops and nourished 13 percent of its livestock, at a total annual value of many billions of dollars. In California, the most productive farm state in the nation, the Imperial Irrigation District alone produced over $1 billion a year in fruits and vegetables. Nearly 50 percent of agricultural supply in the lower basin was diverted solely toward water-inefficient aridland crops, alfalfa and other grasses, for the feeding of livestock. In Lochhead’s view, this outsized share of the river, however enriching of industrial agriculture, however historically entrenched, will have to shrink as cities grow.

“Cities are the more efficient use of water. Cities are where it’s at now,” he said. “We have the money, and the farmers who have the water will be willing to sell.” The National Academies of Science, in a 2007 study of Colorado River management, reported that “agricultural water appears to constitute the most important, and perhaps final, large reservoir available for urban use in the arid U.S. west” — a region where, as the report noted, “unlimited population growth is taken as an article of faith.” Population growth, however, did produce more effluent water for reuse — more water, that is, filled with urine, feces, bath suds, and pharmaceuticals. The NAS researchers noted that effluent was the West’s only growing water supply.

DeBuys asked who in this debate was delusional. He and Weisheit said that farmers they had talked to, in the Imperial Valley, in Utah, in Colorado, in New Mexico, weren’t interested in giving up water rights. The farmers will fight, said Weisheit. Rural interests will be pitted against cities, just as state against state, upper basin against lower basin, had been pitted.. DeBuys worried about the breakdown of rational decision-making in conditions of drought. Drought is not like other natural disasters. Hurricane, flood, storm, and fire sweep down and devastate and pass as quickly, leaving in their wake communities united by the suddenness of the trauma. Drought is gradual. It is geologic in its pace. It takes time, and as it unfolds it erodes society’s confidence, good will, trust. “It gives people plenty of time,” writes deBuys, “to erect defenses, pick sides, and meditate on the defects of their neighbors.”

**

Around mile sixty of our trip, on the sixth day, we entered Cataract Canyon. Weisheit explained that here was the last stretch of the true Colorado, where the river is wild and free-flowing, undammed and unpredictable and colored from its load of silt.

We ran Capsize Rapid and Hell-to-Pay Rapid, and neither raft had trouble. At the approach to the Big Drops, a set of three rapids that culminate in a madhouse of froth called Satan’s Gut, we pulled onto a stony beach to scout. The party followed Weisheit through a tumbled garden of boulders to gain a view of the river from the tallest of the rocks. “Poop Rock,” he said over the cacophony of the water. This traditionally was the site where river rats were supposed to shit themselves in expectation.

The Big Drops roared and churned and urged. Weisheit gathered us around him. He crouched on the boulder, spat on the stone, and with the line of his spittle drew a map of the rapid, delineating on it our safe passage. The Drops consisted in a series of liquid ledges fraught with rocks that had to be avoided, as rocks break oars and heads and tear open the bottoms of boats. Where the water raced over unseen stone and plunged deeply on the other side, it formed holes that cause colossal waves backing against the current and surging upriver. Holes had to be avoided. “We have to be like a pinball but never hit,” said Weisheit. “So: you don’t wanna boink here or boink here.” The spit was drying up. He sighed, spat again, and added: “And you don’t wanna boink here. Or here.”

Powell had portaged the Big Drops, traveling less than three quarters of a mile in a day. I thought of him as we put back into the river. Weisheit waited and watched. The raft drifted. He pointed out the problem of keeper holes, where a rafter tossed from his craft ends up “maytagged” in a terminal hydraulic recirculation, tumbled as in a washing machine, unable to escape the many hundreds of pounds per square inch of downward force—headed fast for a drowning.

The current formed an eerily glassy tongue the tip of which lashed in froth at the first of the watery ledges 50 feet ahead, where the river alarmingly dropped off the face of the planet. Weisheit waited.

In rapids, paradoxically, time from the boater’s perspective is slowest. “I listen for the river,” said Weisheit. The rapid crawled towards us. “I see what the wind’s doing. I need to set up, find my markers. I let the water do the work.” He stood, his eyes casting about. “Now I’ve got my markers.” Two gigantic movements of his arms on the oars: the boat shifted at a slight angle to the first of the ledges. I spoke to him. “Don’t,” he said. The oars again swept the water, a lighter plashing touch, two strokes, three. “Now I need…” Another stroke. “This.”

The boat straightened out, shivered like a rubber ducky, whipped to one side and the other. Under the waves my sight darkened. I caught a glimpse of Weisheit. He looked sleepy, and was gently working his oars so that he seemed to be petting the water. I stared at his pot belly and thought of a statue of Buddha. I turned forward. The water walled up in Satan’s Gut, clattering and crashing and hushing, obscuring the canyon rims and filling with a kind of liquid flame. Weisheit made another single stroke of the oars, swift and canny. The boat leapt, gravity fell away, the contents of my intestines shifted, a camera-like shutter shut and opened.

We did this 29 times over 14 river miles, and as quickly as the rapids came at us they were gone, the whitewater in Cataract Canyon taking less than a day to run. Immediately the current slowed again, bound for its terminus in the reservoir of Lake Powell.^[1]

We barged the two rafts bow to stern, and Weisheit, seeing the current slacken ever more, hung a six horsepower engine off the back of his boat. The motor’s drone filled the silence. Kuhn nosed the air. The river bottom was rotting, farting out its fumes. “I smell a hint of hydrogen sulfide, okay,” he said. “You’re getting decay in the sediment.” There wasn’t enough current to flush it clean. I asked if it was still a river.. There was not a consensus. Kuhn noted that if Lake Powell were to be drained, it would be a remarkably dangerous superfund site.

“At the very lowest levels of the lake,” said Kuhn, “you get funny chemistry, okay. Anoxic conditions. Oxygen gets choked off. Lead, uranium, vanadium, selenium, arsenic, they precipitate out. Not water soluble. If Lake Powell is gone, what’s left is toxic sludge.”

A half hour passed, and we took turns leaping in the water, which began to stink truly.

“I’m gonna vote no, not a river,” said Lochhead.

That night, we made our last camp at a beach that recently had been covered by the receding reservoir. The beach was a hideous patchwork of cracks where the water and the heat of the sun had split it open. The vegetation was gone, the birds were gone, the beavers were gone. Weisheit said we might as well have camped in Phoenix. The next morning, after untying the boats, he stood on the edge of the broken ground and scratched his belly, squinting in the sun to consider the river’s stillness. “Oh despair,” he said.

**

Three months later I flew to Las Vegas to attend the annual December conference of the Colorado River Water Users Association, which included delegations of water managers from every basin state. The event was pegged to the publication of a long-awaited report by the Bureau of Reclamation, the so-called 2013 Basin Study, four years in the making and expected to map a feasible future of water supply in the Southwest. Eric Kuhn had also flown in for the occasion, along with Weisheit, who picked me up at the airport looking unrecognizable in pressed jeans and a clean fleece. Weisheit and I drove through the havoc of light and noise on the Strip to the CRWUA’s traditional meeting place, at Caesar’s Palace, where outside on a nine-acre lake the fountains danced to the music of Broadway show tunes. This was not water directly taken from the Colorado River. It was piss-and-shit effluent cleaned up and recycled for the tourists. “If your life is empty, this is where you go,” said Weisheit. We were pulling into the Caesar’s parking lot, and the doom cloud was heavy. “False, vain, stupid, consumptive. If the whole world were like Vegas I’d kill myself.”

On the first day of the conference, there was the grand opening of the exhibits room, where scores of buffaloes, for the most part aging white men headed for obesity, pressed hands with vendors of the technology of hydraulic civilization. I learned about pipeline systems and canal liners and butterfly valves and mud valves and sluice gates and tilting weirs. “A roomful of fucking lunatics,” muttered Weisheit. “Kuhn and Lochhead are the most progressive water managers in the whole basin compared to these guys.”

I asked a former commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, Robert Johnson, who had served from 2006 to 2009 and was a key adviser on the basin study, whether he had any sense of the total carrying capacity of the Colorado basin. He told me with chipper reassurance that Reclamation had looked closely at river augmentation—piping water from the Missouri River, for example. “There are solutions. They are expensive. They will take time. It won’t be easy.” I asked again as to whether Reclamation had examined the basin’s carrying capacity. “Carrying capacity,” he said, and stared at me. “I don’t quite know what you mean. You’re assuming that water is a limitation on growth? Because you can almost always find water to meet needs. Why is water any different than other necessities for growth, like lumber, like electricity? Water is not the limiting factor in economic development.”

What then, I asked, are the ecological constraints on growth? “You can have your cake and eat it too,” said Johnson. “It’s just going to cost more.”

“There are no constraints?”

“I am not God,” he said. He was becoming exasperated. His mustache twitched. “I don’t know!”

“You were the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation and you don’t know?”

“I don’t have an answer,” he said, “and I don’t know anybody who does have an answer on what the constraint is. I’m sensitive to ecological constraints, don’t get me wrong. I really am sensitive.”

On the second day, Reclamation unveiled its basin study in a morning-long presentation. By 2060, the basin would face shortages of as much as 3.5 million acre-feet, or as much water as would be lacking for more than ten million people. At lunch with Eric Kuhn, I asked him his assessment. “The study is a four million dollar statement of the obvious,” he said, adding that its assumptions were in fact falsely optimistic.

The buffaloes crowded around an open bar to celebrate Reclamation’s achievement, and I got myself two whiskeys. When Weisheit was at the nadir of his alcohol addiction, in his thirties, he was consuming five liters of wine a day and waking in the night with the shakes. He was dying. “I got a second chance,” he told me. “When you get a second chance, you move beyond the present, you think about the future. The buffaloes are alcoholics all sitting in the same bar, all in denial. Water is a renewable resource, but the only reason we can move it around is non-renewable—cheap energy. Cheap energy won’t be here in fifty years. You import more water, you bring more people to live in the desert, and then what do you do fifty years from now? Oops? We fucked up? Didn’t know it was coming? It’s just a set-up for heartbreak for millions of Americans coming to settle the west. Just what John Wesley Powell had warned against, what he wanted to avoid. What other city most typifies heartbreak? That’s why this conference happens in Las Vegas. That’s why we’re at Caesar’s Palace, which honors a civilization that collapsed.”

One evening during a break in the conference, I drove 30 miles east to Hoover Dam, tracing the shore of Lake Mead’s lost elevation, which stood at 1,119. When I arrived at the dam at dusk, the tourists had gone home, and the security crew told me I had just a few minutes to walk up and down the length of its top-deck before closing. Great voices, stentorian and echoing out of the darkness, issued from loudspeakers on recorded loops that played without cease from dawn to dark, telling of the taming of “the most dangerous river in the world,” how “in the shadow of Hoover Dam one feels that the future is limitless,” how “in the same way the Pyramids represent Ancient Egypt, or the Coliseum represents Rome,” so Hoover Dam represented the “building genius of America.” Another voice on a separate loop, always deep and certain, bid me gaze at a celestial watch, a wheel of time, that was engraved in the dam in brass, tracing the celestial year, which lasts 25,694 earth years. Upcanyon there was the stone stillness of the impounded water, which fell lower by the day.

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^[1] Two hundred miles to the south, below Glen Canyon Dam, where the Colorado issued from Lake Powell into the Grand Canyon, the river was an aqueduct pretending to be wild. It was unnaturally clear, as the silt it should have carried had backed up behind the dam, and it was unnaturally cold, issuing from the bottom of the dam, providing a nasty environment for native warm-water fish. In Grand Canyon National Park, the river’s beaches, the riparian habitat, were disappearing because of lack of sediment deposits, the water was stocked with fish by National Park Service biologists, and the dam-controlled flows were as scheduled as a ride at an amusement park.

Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history.

— the NY Times, May 26, 2026

(This piece originally appeared at Romanticon.)

One could not invent a more diabolical conspiracy for mass mind control than the one playing out openly, daily, everywhere there is a personal computer or screen-phone and a signal connecting users to the digital matrix. The conspiracy is all-encompassing, world-girdling.

It is where this machine envelops the human brain, in the moment of contact between the ape and the screen, that interests me. Fascinating is the ape’s repetitive stroking of the device, head bent as in prayer – the demented stillness of an animal caught in the tractor beam of the controllers who operate the matrix. Absorption into the system of control has nothing to do with the content it offers. The whirligigs of color and lights, the swirl of music, the chatter of talking heads: all irrelevant, so long as the device is gripped, the screen glows, the user stares and is stilled, and control is maintained through entertainment and entrainment.

By now, deep into the age of digital megamachine authoritarianism, as inhuman-scale monopolies run by oligarchs manipulate what we know and think and how we govern, it should be clear to all that the liberation of humankind from this soft tyranny requires not only the toppling of the oligarchs but the take-down and annihilation of the World Wide Web that has served their purposes for too long.

The Web, spun by a cabal of techno-fascists, has already ensnared billions in mental slavery – go to any continent and watch the apes of all colors a-stroking. Ever expanding under the direction of the techno-fascists, the Web now seeks to trap the few remaining souls on Earth yet beyond its ambit. To paraphrase Diderot (or is it Montaigne? Voltaire?), the world will not be free until the last tech bro is strangled with the entrails of the last computer programmer.

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The cynical reader remarks immediately on the hypocrisy of issuing this call for war against the digital order using the structures of the digital order. I respond with the example of the French Resistance and partisan guerillas everywhere in Nazi-occupied Europe, who fought their oppressors using weapons captured from enemy ranks. It is a rational use of resources to exploit digital platforms for the annihilation of the digital.

A parallel is white male privilege. As a white Euro-American male, I enjoy immensely the opportunity my position affords to undermine, erode, destabilize, demoralize, sabotage, or directly attack the armatures of the control system. The badge of white maleness is akin to a security clearance to blow up bombers on the tarmac before they take off, steal secrets to sow chaos in the surveillance state (the Snowden model), spread viruses to wreck corporate property in the cloud (the Anonymous model), among other storied tactics.

**

For more than 15 years, hopelessly, in perfect futility, I have been inveighing against the digital authoritarian order that expanded and accelerated with mass adoption of screen telecommunication devices (STDs). I decried how we walked right into the trap like rodents in glue by taking the devices onto our bodies and strapping them to our brainpans. I railed about STDs in publications that saw fit to publish the jeremiads (e.g., here, in 2012, and here, in 2019, to cite two).

Of my then teenage daughter’s mooring on Facebook, I wrote:

Behold homo sapiens lashed on the wheel of the digital social network: held frozen over a computer…staring into the lit screen, the face pale in the unnatural light; or, with head bent in the street, the appearance sullen, running fingers across the blinking object of desire. The creature is secretly harried: Constant updates are necessary, the user must tend the machine whenever and wherever possible – which is all the time and everywhere – and god forbid there is too long a lapse in the slipstream…

Let’s forget for a moment that Facebook is probably the most ingenious info-aggregator yet invented for governments to spy on citizens. Forget that the citizens are willingly doing the work for the intelligence agencies in building the database. I worry about the matter of efficiency in friendship. Facebook makes friendship efficient, in the manner of the assembly line, which is exactly what friendship should not be – if it is to remain human, if the friend as person is not to be degraded. Friendship is dirty. It’s difficult. It smells – it sometimes has bad breath. It’s unpredictable, and sometimes hazardous. The issue is about persons and about friendship defined, for if we are to take Facebook seriously, then we must recognize that the form of friendship it is promulgating will by technologic necessity reduce the nature and meaning of the friend. Personhood on the Facebook page can only go so far. It is a managed self. It is degraded personhood.

These many articles, farting in the wind, accomplished nothing except to reinforce my despair at the spread of the rampant STDs.

Sometimes the despair morphs into horror. As when, for example, on the 4 train in New York City, bound for Brooklyn, I see before me a 13-year-old girl swiping through Instagram, images upon images never-ending, her motions no longer those of a human child, spontaneous, free, organic, but those of an automaton, programmed, ordered, acted upon, without agency outside the centralized controlling power system.

I am reminded of Lewis Mumford’s description of an autistic nine-year-old boy in his indictment of technoindustrialism compiled as the seminal two-part book The Myth of the Machine, published between 1967 and 1970. The boy, Joey, believed he was run by machines. “So controlling was this belief that Joey carried with him an elaborate life-support system made up of radio tubes, light bulbs, and a breathing machine. At meals he ran imaginary wires from a wall socket to himself, so his food could be digested. His bed was rigged up with batteries, a loudspeaker, and other improvised equipment to keep him alive while he slept.”

“Is this just the autistic fantasy of a pathetic little boy?” asked Mumford. “Is it not rather the state that the mass of mankind is fast approaching in actual life, without realizing how pathological it is?” The pathology is “to be cut off from [one’s] own resources for living, to feel no tie with the outer world unless [one is] connected with the Power Complex and constantly receive[s] information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central external source.”

As I wrote a decade ago:

there is something at once pitiful and repulsive – nauseating – in so many fellow human beings doing the same thing with the same electroplastic appendage hooked up to the same global network: the hand outstretched with device cupped, the eyes locked on the singular object, hooked into the Singularity. The appendage, always making some sort of rude noise demanding attention, appears to be doing the living, the leading, the looking, and the human holding it is afterthought, necessary only to point it like a divining rod to determine the next step forward.

It is horror indeed to watch the child on a subway car thus entrained, and the horror grows when you realize every person in the car (including me) is similarly locked to the electroplastic appendage as if it’s the last handhold on a cliff over an abyss.

Though tech apologists will of course say otherwise, the digital control system must come to an end – Joey must be freed.

How to do so involves multipronged, highly organized acts of sabotage by trained cadres targeting the right infrastructure – hardened root server complexes, data centers, undersea cables. As one writer at Gizmodo in a thought-experiment about killing the internet put it: “With all the cables cut, the Internet is landlocked, broken up into a handful of tiny Internets that can’t talk to one another. Messages can’t be sent around the world anymore…After demolishing the root servers, web addresses are reduced to incomprehensible code numbers. The destruction of the Internet is ready for its coup de grâce: Blow up the boxes that hook what’s left together” – the data centers, whose mindless breakneck expansion recently has had the beneficial effect of radicalizing the public in opposition.

Destruction of property on this scale is beyond my skill set. But hopefully there are madmen out there – perhaps Euro-American males, tidy and trim, with the proper security clearances – working on the endeavor as we speak.

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In the first week of April, tribal villagers in the forested mountains of Odisha, a state in India, came under attack by heavily armed police. In Kantamal, population 1000, a hub of anti-mining resistance in Odisha, the police entered the village at 3 am, firing rifles in the air, breaking down doors where families slept, beating and tear-gassing them. They then rounded up villagers for interrogation.

The illegal raid had one purpose: to terrorize. It was the second round of late-night attacks in a month, after 21 villagers, including ten women, were arrested in another nearby stronghold of the anti-mining movement.

What offense had the Indigenous tribespeople, called Kondh Adivasis in India, committed that authorities targeted them so? Over the last few months, they had joined with hundreds of other villagers to participate in a round-the-clock land defense blockade to prevent miners access to a sacred mountain called Tijmali.

The Kondh animists’ most venerated mythical ancestor, Tij Raja, is said to live on the mountain, his spirit the source of perennial streams that race from the peak through tropical forests. It is from the clean waters and unspoiled environment of Tijmali that Tij Raja’s Adivasi progeny, and their less numerous brethren, the Dom people, get food, medicine and, not least, spiritual sustenance. Theirs is a deep and abiding relationship with the natural world, based in subsistence agriculture and animist fervor.

But Mount Tijmali is also rich in bauxite, the precursor ore for the production of aluminum, demand for which is skyrocketing, driven by industrial growth worldwide, including the breakneck construction of aluminum-devouring data centers. Vedanta Resources, a $22 billion global giant headquartered in London and helmed by a British national of Indian origin, has long eyed the mountain as a prime site for a bauxite mine. Vedanta won the lease for what is called the Sijimali Mine Project in 2023 and now the company wants to proceed with the first tranche of forest clearance and begin digging.

The Kondh Adivasis and the Doms refuse to allow this to happen. “We are children of Tij Raja, how can we allow our Tijmali to be mined?” said villagers in a prepared statement during a public hearing in Odisha in 2023. “Tijmali is our soul. How can we live without our soul? Mining will destroy not just the streams but our identity. We shall fight and will not let Vedanta mine our soul.”

Together, the two communities form an integral Indigenous fraternity now resisting the onslaught of the state and the mining interests it serves. The blockade on Tijmali to stop Vedanta’s workmen from accessing the mountaintop has yet to be broken.

But how long can these people hold out, armed with axes, sickles and sticks, and bows and arrows, when faced with the monopoly on violence the state leverages against them? It appears the government of Narendra Modi has lost patience with these recalcitrants and is determined to end the blockade – even if it means killing a few of them, and arresting many others to fill the jails and clog the criminal courts.

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Why does this matter? The broad context is the plight facing Indigenous people worldwide: industrial development of all kinds – road-building, oil and gas drilling, urbanization, and, not least, renewable energy and green-tech mining – now threatens the environmental stability of 60 percent of Indigenous lands in 64 countries, an area as big as Canada, the U.S., and Brazil combined.

And what of the vaunted claims of a “sustainable” future on the horizon for industrialism? It won’t be sustainable for tribespeople such as the Kondh and Dom. They will have to make way for the techno-industrial system as it attempts to green itself.

A recent inventory of thirty so-called energy transition minerals and metals (ETMs) – those resources needed to build out renewable electricity production to wean industrial society off fossil fuels – estimates that 54 percent of ETMs are located on or near Indigenous peoples’ land. Some 85 percent of lithium reserves, 75 percent of manganese reserves, and more than half of nickel, copper and zinc projects are located in the territories of Indigenous peoples. At least a third of ETM projects are occurring on, or near, Indigenous territory or farmers’ land where inhabitants face a combination of water risk, conflict and food insecurity due to this new industrial encroachment.

To be clear, the Indigenous are under siege by the industrial system, facing cultural, spiritual, and, in some cases, literal oblivion.

The Adivasi and Dom anti-mining protestors of Odisha offer a stirring example to tribespeople worldwide — and to the rest of us, too — of heroic courage in defense of soil, water, air, wildlife, biodiversity, biotic communities and human communities who live intimately connected with the natural world. They have modeled for the planet a true environmental defense – a defense that means putting bodies in front of the monstrous mega-machine of capitalism. More on the fight in Odisha soon…

Prashant Rahi is a veteran journalist at large in India who, in his own words, “associates with and reports about struggles of the toiling masses across the subcontinent, including indigenous peoples and other suppressed societies, confronting diverse forms of exploitation, socio-political oppression, state violence, and the denial of dignity and democratic rights.”

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Across the planet the lord of the Anthropocene strides, towering and terrible and carrying a smartphone. Picture him now: a 5G-enabled golem that’s part Bill Gates, part Elon Musk, part Donald Trump, with an asshole modeled precisely after the face of Jeff Bezos.

Behind this monster dutifully march masses of tiny simulacra who want to be as big one day as the creature they follow, harnessing industry and innovation, making all lifeforms bow.

The path being traced is a suicidal one. It leads to the undermining of the biophysical systems that allow our survival. The irony would be laughable if the universe had a sense of humor.

The rich men of the world don’t seem worried, thinking that they can buy their way out of system collapse. That’s why you have Bezos breezily making unhinged declarations, such as this one at a code conference: “You don’t want to live on an Earth where we have to freeze population growth, reduce energy utilization….We want the population to keep growing on this planet. We want to keep using more energy per capita.”

The recipe for disaster.

The problem I face as a journalist is that editorial gatekeepers believe too much in the godheads Gates-Musk-Bezos, firmly in the tech messianist & saviorist camp. And the gatekeepers, of course, are the ones who hold the money for us freelancers. This is the reason I’ve started a nonprofit, Denatured, to fund my work. Alternative sources of support are much needed.

There are of course noble exceptions in media. But the tendency is that if one approaches the leading newspapers -- for example the greatest of the most prize-winning and self-congratulating, such as the New York Times -- to suggest that the chief investigation of the 2020s and beyond should be how ecological disruption leads almost certainly to civilizational collapse…

…and if, as part of that pitch one suggests a critical reappraisal of humanity along the lines of ecologist William Catton’s understanding of Homo colossus, a fossil-fuel-evolved species whose world-spanning dominance is but a blip in time and is set to cease sooner than we can imagine…

…if one remarks that the seemingly significant present-day cultural productions of Homo colossus are pretty much a joke when measured against the costs he (and she – let’s not be sexist) impose so violently on other-than-human life...

...if one implies that maybe we wise apes aren’t the greatest show on earth and that the putative beauty of Whatever Cultural Production will never reach the same high quality as a free-running sweetwater brook in a forest…

...if one questions the you-must-be-crazy economic model of Homo colossus, which is endless growth – growth of industry, population, and consumption; if one mentions in the most self-censoring manner that our system of Endless Growth™ necessarily leads to climate derangement and widespread biophysical system disruption that ends in social chaos...

...if you bother to offer any of this in the air-conditioned towers of the gatekeepers, your career has veered into the territory of dead end. Go get the editors some coffee – they have the “politically feasible” on their minds.

But keep on pestering your betters, like the homeless nut on the corner, like Bartleby in exile.

Perhaps ask the gatekeepers something like the following: Wouldn’t it be better to stop growing the economy and instead take the vast wealth that exists today, right now, and spread it around equitably instead of condemning future generations to the tortures of a scorched earth?

Good luck with that.

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After a decade covering the hollowing out, neutering and stupefaction of an increasingly bureaucratized environmental movement in the U.S. – I wrote a book, my first, that included a chapter on the subject – I’ve found that in the mob of humanity the few wise and trustworthy people are the ecologists, those who understand the sophisticated big-picture tapestry of the laws of nature, which in the end are the only laws that matter.

Consider William Rees, an ecological economist, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, and former director of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Rees should be one of the names known to North American households but is instead consigned to the ranks of the beleaguered minority that advocates “degrowth.” Degrowth is defined as a planned contraction of population and economies so that Homo colossus might shrink to the status of a mere animal living within the constraints of Earth.

The problem is that degrowth is not politically feasible.

Rees notes in a recent essay that the sense of what’s feasible is necessarily based on our fossil-fueled party of the past 150 years. The party entered its let’s-fuck-everything-that-moves phase only after 1990, with 50 percent of all fossil fuels burned in just the last 36 years. “[W]hile the present generation and other recent cohorts of H. sapiens take continuous growth to be the norm,” he writes, “the past few decades of explosive growth comprise the single most anomalous period in human history.” [emphasis his]

During this period of extreme carbon subsidy that supercharged exponential growth of GDP and led to environmental pillage on an unprecedented scale, the world played out the grand guignol called globalization. But it was a one-off. And it has produced a devastating situation called ecological overshoot.

Here’s Rees: “When in [ecological overshoot] the maintenance and growth of the human enterprise is achieved in part through the over-consumption of plant and animal biomass and the degradation of the ecosphere. Here is malignancy….Like any other ill-adapted parasite, [modern technoindustrial] culture is systematically – even enthusiastically – consuming the biophysical basis of its own existence.”

Let that sink in. We are consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence.

Where are the editorial gatekeepers in this discussion, in what should be the debate of our lifetimes, on which the fate of humanity hangs? Where can we find in the mainstream press an authoritative and meaningful encounter with the biophysical limits of Earth and what this implies for civilization?

The answer is nowhere, because any conceivable limits to humanity’s outsize ambitions are dismissed as a “thought experiment” irrelevant to the “real world” of governing growth-oriented societies. The quotes here are from an email exchange with a now-retired editor at the New York Times op-ed page, in response to a proposal for a piece about limits to growth.

And where are the climate scientists? With few exceptions, they have not dared to question the growth doctrine that drives our carbon collision course. Peter Kalmus, a data scientist at NASA, and Manfred Lenzen, a nuclear physicist turned sustainability researcher at the University of Sydney, are two of the exceptions that come to mind.

I asked Kalmus why the silence. “The claim that we need to shift from the never-ending exponential growth economic model to something new that could be described as an end to economics or even capitalism as we know it, is a pretty extraordinary claim,” he replied in an email. “I think a lot of scientists don’t feel comfortable making that claim, which is outside their field of expertise. However, I personally don’t see a viable way out of climate and ecological breakdown without a transition to degrowth, and I think more and more climate scientists are starting to agree with that.”

Yet they don’t speak their minds. Why not?

While we’re at it, I wonder about the tenuous position of climate journalists who remain silent on the question of growth, notably climate Substackerati such as Emily Atkins and David Roberts and the like. Not a word from them about growthism, alas. More often one hears from these highly intelligent and accomplished professionals the same droning mantra of tech religionist machine-worship solutionism, i.e. that a literal deus ex machina is all that’s needed for the maintenance of business-as-usual.

Why also do so many of these people now embrace the notion of “green growth”? Green growth posits that material and population expansion can be decoupled from environmental impact in a world energized with wind, water, solar. But it’s a lie. As University of Lausanne ecological economist Julia Steinberger has written, “I’m not sure our public discourse in media & teaching has *quite* caught up to the fact that green growth is a fiction...deceased, gone...utterly cancelled by research.”

“Growth is comforting,” Steinberger told me, “because it aligns with currently powerful forces and structures in our economies: profit-oriented corporations, wealth accumulation and the power that comes with wealth.”

That’s why degrowth, which threatens wealth accumulation, is not at present politically feasible – an impasse at the center of which is that the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.

The 1972 book Blueprint for Survival, published by the Ecologist magazine, put it another way: “If we plan remedial action with our eyes on political rather than ecological reality, then very reasonably, very practicably, and very surely we shall muddle our way to extinction.”

Hello, mass death: here we come!

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(This piece originally appeared at Romanticon.)

Below are two in a series of letters to an ecosaboteur, declared by our government an “ecoterrorist,” who served ninety-six months in federal prison. In an email from prison, this individual, whom I will call Saboteur, wrote: “Anatole France came close to the theme that Sartre was later to exploit: the tragic solitude of the thinker in a hostile community........... Prison is the most hostile of all communities…” The subject line of his email was “alone.” He had written previously that he felt now, at the tail end of his sentence, that he was losing his mind.

His inspiration to act—he destroyed fossil fuel infrastructure—was love of the natural world, wild places, wild flora and fauna. My reply to Saboteur, who turned sixty-seven this year, was an attempt to cheer him up…

I.

I’m sorry I missed your last few calls. I was out taking my ten-year-old daughter backpacking. And since she asks questions about you often enough (as I talk about you often), I told her that you spent a good part (the best part?) of your forties and fifties guiding nieces and nephews into the wild with backpack, on foot and free and easy.

To assuage your loneliness, forthwith some random notes on my trip with Josie up Plateau Mountain in the Catskill range.

Now the Catskills, mind you, is not a range at all, not orogenic, formed by tectonic folding of the Earth’s crust, but is in fact an eroded plateau, an uplift dissected into pieces much like the Colorado Plateau has been dissected. Except this violent erosive process was made gentle with the help of glaciers, the most significant of which was the Wisconsinan Glacier, which lasted 75,000 to roughly 11,000 years ago. This last glaciation rounded the edges of the high points of the plateau, carved rolling valleys and cirques, created shallow river corridors with fast run-off, and, where there might have been impossibly walled canyons in a plateau of the American West, fashioned instead narrow notches where the cols of the “peaks” gloomily come together. The major peaks of the Catskills plateau ascend to a relatively uniform height, between 3500 and 4000 feet, and at a distance they have the table aspect of mesas. What distinguishes them most clearly from the plateau country of the West is the rich rushing green: the deciduous oaks, beeches, birches, and the evergreen conifers, the Eastern white pine, balsam fir, and spruce.

Plateau Mountain, as its name suggests, is the most canyon-country-like of these peaks. The climb to the top of Plateau is from a v-shaped col called Stony Clove Notch, also called the Devil’s Notch. The trail from Stony Clove Notch rises nearly 2000 feet in the space of 1.3 miles. A difficult climb—especially for a ten-year-old girl shouldering a 15-pound pack.

It is of course as green as the ancient English mythic forests where the Green Man lives, he who peeks behind ferns in the woods, who might kill you, but is mostly loving. A few years back, when she was six or maybe seven, Josie and I were planting seeds, building our vegetable garden, and I told her bedtime stories about the Green Man who leapt from the forest and could eat a fallen man, woman, or child—human beings as compost.

There has been terrific heat during the last month in the lowlands around the Catskills: ninety degree highs, day after day of unbroken sun and blue sky, rarely seen here, probably a new weather regime of climate warming. But in the higher reaches of the mountains this heat softens, takes on a delightful aspect, with silken zephyrs, and brings the chance to travel in the backcountry with barely any weight. A normal Catskills in summer is sunny for a minute, then rainy, foggy, dismal, doomy, blowing a gale, or still as death, buggy and humid—and all these strange troubled faces of the mountains can show in the space of days. Which means preparation and too many things to carry.

But now that a hot calm clear-blue-eyed weather had stabilized, Josie and I traveled light on our ascent of Plateau Mountain, starting the climb late in the day, around 6 pm, with sunset not two and half hours away, and the long tail of twilight until 9:30 pm or a little later.

The trail was steep, and we toiled and sweated. Josie complained not one bit. She rallied me to her side when I slowed. The air was still. The insects were quiet. No brooks or streams or rills ran; we’ve had little rain lately, and the land was in the early stages of drought. I worried about our water. I had brought a gallon for the both of us, taken from the tap at home, and a water filter in case we found surface water. A few springs burble in wet years on the high Catskill peaks, but for the most part these are dry places. We got thirsty. Lots of sweat and groans, the good and happy kind, as everywhere along the trail there were ledges and boulders and cobbles and minor difficulties galore. I worried about the water, and I worried about the time—dusk now and we were hardly nearer the rim of the mountain, as Plateau is one of those “peaks” in the Catskills that really does form a mesa rim.

At about 3,000 feet of elevation, relief: the satiny zephyrs of an evening breeze. We were both of us soaked in sweat, wet to the skin, wet down to our wool socks (for even in summer on the trail I’ve taught Josie to wear only wool socks). The stirring air drove through our soaked clothes, the effect a pleasant evaporative cooling.

Still we climbed. The trail faced west and now there was a sunset of marvelous red-pink-purple immensity we caught sight of through the rustling leaves of the silver birches and the paper birches. Soon, the full dark, moonless, time for headlamps. Josie was afraid. Bears, she said. I had a pistol in my pack, and showed her the gun to allay her fears, clearing the chamber and handing it to her. “Looks like a blaster!” she said (being a Star Wars fan). She held and weighed it without judgment.

For the most part you don’t need a gun out here, not for bears or anyone else. Subjective risk and objective risk are two explicitly competing worlds, and the subjective risk, Josie’s perception of it, was allayed a bit (meaninglessly) with the knowledge that ol’ backpacker dad carried a gun to deal with the non-existent objective risk. I told her the greatest risk on this wondrous mountain was that we might happen on another Homo sapiens playing music on a portable IJoy Beachbomb sound system. Blind and deaf hominids as they hike deep in wilderness need to get terribly lost and never be able to recharge their Beachbombs.

We climbed and climbed, the trail narrowed to the cone of light from our headlamps, the breeze blew stronger and warmer, all the living world on the steep mountainside shook and danced and hushed. With our lamps we groped the final stretch along a series of ledges, and at the top, where the wind blew fiercest, we looked for a place to lay our sleeping bags, found one in the duff of high country firs and pines, and hugged. And did a little dance, celebration of finding a place to sleep that was endearing, lovely, the perfume of the balsam fir filling the air. Here was the revealed edge of the world, here was a small taste of immensity.

Let it never be said, however, that such glory is because of conquest. It is not glorious by the measures of the deranged creature called the Competitive Man, who keeps by his side the sick concubine Competitive Woman-who-Wants-to-Be-Man. It is not glorious by the measure of some inane clown-mimicry of a climb up K2, Kilimanjaro, fastest ascent (fastest masturbation), fastest descent, etc., etc., ad absurdum.

The glory is when the walker in the woods, mere animal Homo sapiens, finds the still point of the turning world: “Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered.... Except for the point, the still point.”

II.

There are visions sometimes in the middle of a summer’s day that can only happen in the woods.

I was on the banks of a pond off Mount Tremper, here in the Catskills, with Josie and her sister Léa and Josie’s friend Ito, on a day of high wind and pouring sun under a big blue sky.

The sunlight, the wind on the pond, the shifting breezes threw the surface of the water this way and that, so that the rippling liquid burst in traceries of fire, golden treasures, scintillations, waves of diamonds and crystals one after the other as if in rhythms of the sea.

I sat at the edge of the pond watching this astonishing performance, captive in a waking dream, world reduced to a simple matter of energy, playfulness, unending fire on water, and, dare I say, a sense of eternal life. Ito and Josie found the usual tadpoles. They waded and watched.

Added to the vision of the light was the play of the wind in the forest that thickly sat on the banks of the pond. The oaks, beeches, birches, maples, richly green with early summer leaves, bowed and swayed and whispered and seemed to be moving toward me in a body, as one, and then away, and then lifting arms and gazing skywards.

These dancing woodlands, and the fiery dancing lights on the surface of the pond, and my kids in the bright water cupping gently the tadpoles who are future frogs—all enough pleasure and meaning for a lifetime.

Then the vision was gone, and I was returned again to wretched selfhood.

“Energy is eternal delight,” wrote William Blake. Consciousness of the energy in life forms is the basic need today to maintain sanity.

We are surrounded for the most part, as you know, with death forms: screen telecom devices (our rampant infection of STDs); concrete-glass-and-metal habitat, mass-produced industrial materials; automaton-like behaviors in relation to technology, e.g., staring at phones as if we ourselves are mass-produced simulacra, not humans but cardboard cut-outs of humans colored variously but always with handheld tyrant machine; death-consciousness represented in film and television wherein homicidal violence is widespread, the orgiastic use of guns as dramatic acts of redemption; death-consciousness enacted in our streets, offices, schools in mass shootings perpetrated most often by young men who clearly are replicating the gun violence they see displayed on film and television.

Technological, automated, false-image-saturated death worship seems to be at the heart of our culture—a culture, it hardly needs reminding, headed for collective suicide as it breaches the biophysical limits of mother Earth.

What alternative forms of worship are immediately at hand? The fire on the water that I observed on that pond, the higher consciousness that comes with immersion in the vision of light that subsumes the self, is the place to start looking. Or high up on Plateau Mountain, in the perfume of the balsam firs. Worship based in a living environment and relatedness to the complexity of biotic communities and organismic multitudes.

But alas… most people now packed in cities… divorced from environment… nature just a jumble of words, or, worse, images on a screen, hardly a lived experience… and organismic multitudes? Fewer and fewer to be found in a world increasingly made of concrete-glass-metal… and fast on its way to the sixth mass extinction.

—Christopher Ketcham

Analysts have looked at the noble exceptions, such as in the case of Luigi Mangione, but in general it’s known that wrong people are consistently killed, right people left alone.

This is a distressing status quo that demands address by social policy to produce change for the better. The attached study is an attempt to do so.

Our team at the School for Effective Social Violence at Cornell University looked at 25 years of data of hapless citizens engaged in mass shootings against other hapless citizens.

Our interest initially was to understand the horror implicit in these shootings, as people see family members killed for no other reason than irrational modalities that lead to targeting of typically beleaguered socioeconomic classes.

We included in our data a look at who should and shouldn’t be killed in mass shootings, as determined by mass shooters themselves and using census-driven polls combined with opinion surveys in partnership with Quinnipiac and other polling services.

Our team arrived at startling findings: mass shooters aligned closely with most Americans in the determination that the super-rich, AI barons, tech bros, Wall Street financiers, and their representatives in Congress should probably be killed within the next month (73 percent), the next year (96 percent), and within the next five years (12,976 percent).

Consider the DC sniper shootings during 2002, twenty-four years ago. This was a classic American father-son team but never represented as such in the media. The problem is the obvious one: the snipers attempted to kill average Washingtonians when lobbyists, CEOs, cabinet members, a sitting president (George W. Bush), and congresspersons masquerading as human beings presented a far more compelling target pool. The misguidedness then remains the case today, a danger to the republic. If only the DC snipers had help – this is where Cornell comes in.

At Cornell, we’ve developed the beta model, ideally to go live later this year, of the Assassination Assistance Help and Hotline (AAHH), which involves call centers nationwide offering guidance, a caring voice, maps, ammunition, and scheduling to nut-jobs who are ready to go off the cliff. In the AAHH model, licensed mental health professionals and trained killers at AAHH call centers are on-hand to talk mass shooters through their crises, directing them toward preferred targets and away from the average joe, so that society can achieve a level of rationality in mass shootings.

In hundreds of test sequences for AAHH, our analysts found that crazed gun-nuts on the brink, when given guidance toward killing the right people, will take the advice. They are longing for direction, a key component in psychosis.

Here’s a sample conversation from AAHH researchers involving an Ohio man who was convinced to water-balloon with blood and feces his local Republican legislator, who he charged with open corruption. (This gentle recourse, as opposed to murder, was due to the fact that our permits had yet to be issued for full-on assassination):

Blood’n’feces Shooter: Gonna do it. Gonna take out the whole office. Last time they do this to me.

AAHH: Sir, it’s okay. Hear? We’re going to talk you through this.

Blood’n’feces Shooter: I’m gonna kill ‘em all.

AAHH: Well, not all. Some.

Blood’n’feces Shooter: Not all…

AAHH: Some.

Thus is an opening made to re-direct the shooter’s attention away from the fellows at the workplace to, say, the oligarchs and their representatives in his neighborhood.

Accessing our Target Informational Databases (TID) for known office, home, and vacation sites, commuting and travel patterns, favored bars and restaurants, and other zones of frequentation – a database developed with the help of top Israeli surveillance firms working with the National Security Agency – the AAHH correlates the shooters’ location with possible targets.

As a side note, it turns out that the island of Manhattan, with its panoply of people employed in the FIRE sector (finance-insurance-real estate) along with advertising, marketing, and public relations, has the country’s highest per-acre population of individuals who fit the profile of preferred targets at the Assassination Assistance Help and Hotline. (Second in this ranking of greater metro areas is Silicon Valley). This was an unexpected result of our research. We are still trying to figure out the implications for New Yorkers.

Image by Kseniya Lapteva.

(Article originally published at CounterPunch)

To my fellow Americans who moved South because you didn’t like winter: reality is coming.

The cold chilled your bones, I get it. You were sick of longjohns unwashed that became stinking fart sacks. The gray skies and long dark of the North hurt your fragile hearts, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” was snobbery, and chopping wood and toughing out the warren of freezes and thaws and snow and rain and fog – no, it was all too much.

You wanted to be diapered for eternal summer sun, thinking you could soil yourself for the rest of your days in a lawn chair and not have to clean up. To this end, you in the South voted in vast majorities for an ecocidal maniac, raising a middle finger to the rest of the planet.

I happen to know personally one of these snowbird shitheads. A year ago, I was renting an apartment from a landlord in the Catskill Mountains, in the little village of Pine Hill, NY. The landlord defrauded me of seventeen hundred dollars. His name is Mr. Gordon. He was a New York resident but recently moved to Florida. A newborn Southron and proud Trumpster, Mr. Gordon thinks Florida has a future.

But reality is coming. And reality is going to hurt Mr. Gordon, as he deserves to be hurt, for being a fraudster and liar. (He models himself, naturally, after his hero in the White House.)

Consider the air-conditioned crates that Mr. Gordon and his fellow Sun Belters call housing. The plastic boxes, whatever the supersize, are not long for this world. They will burn and/or flood. They will become heat-death traps when the energy grid fails. The Southrons have bought cheap and will end up paying dear for their McMansions, with their livelihoods and, perhaps sooner than they think, their lives.

First sign of the coming doom? The insurance market is abandoning them. Oh, what’s that? Well, sunworms, it’s your beloved capitalist marketplace in action.

***

Last year, analysts at First Street, a financial research firm in Manhattan that models the future of property values in a climate-damaged world, issued a report suggesting that home values in the US will experience a catastrophic reversal over the next three decades. The total projected loss: $1.47 trillion. Why? Planetary heating will shatter the housing market in the most vulnerable areas, mainly the Sun Belt, center of the congealed mass of Trump voters who don’t believe the warming regime is real. As First Street’s helpful maps of future destruction of property values make clear, the major losses will occur in Florida and Texas, with lesser but not to be discounted destruction of value in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.

Unlike elected officials, government bureaucrats, too many NGOs that should know better, and most of the media, insurance companies are leading the way in establishing the new reality that climate, not Wall Street, not the speculative investor class, will dictate the value of real estate. Initially, housing in areas hit with planetary-heating-driven hurricanes, storm surge, and flooding will face enormous increases in the cost of insurance. According to First Street, the four largest metro areas expected to see the highest increases in insurance premiums over the next 30 years are Miami, with a 322% increase, followed by Jacksonville, (226%), Tampa (213%), and New Orleans (196%). Skyrocketing insurance premiums, coupled with repeated uninsurable losses due to storm damage, will drive people out of these cities. Second thing to consider: the market price of homes will plummet as insurance costs go up, and this will be followed by an increasing percentage of housing stock declared simply uninsurable.

Over time, due to these combined factors, there will be a regional exodus, according to the First Street analysis. The report describes “climate migration” that will drive “population redistribution,” with some 55 million Americans by 2055 voluntarily relocating within the U.S. to areas “less vulnerable to climate risks.”

That’s an astonishing figure, amounting to almost 17 percent of current US population. The percentage in 2055 will be slightly less with expected population growth, and probably only slightly less impactful. (Population growth is of course the key driver of the coming catastrophe – more people in untenable patterns of settlement means more suffering down the line – but can’t talk about that.) The last great in-country migration in the historical record of the United States occurred during the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when some 2.5 million people fled the Plains states. At the time, US population was 130 million people.

If the First Street analysts are correct in their projections, we are looking at a population transfer never seen before in American history.

Will the most intelligent, most capable, most far-thinking and inventive people on earth, as Trump assures us about Americans, heed the message that the places seemingly most desirable for habitation today are to be mostly abandoned within a generation? Of course not.

According to a 2024 US Census Bureau report, the South “added more people than all other regions combined, making it both the fastest-growing and largest-gaining region in the country.” MSN.com reports that “the Southern region, already the nation’s most populous, has been the only area to sustain consistent population growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to domestic migration.” Within the South, it was Texas (at a gain of 562,941) and Florida (at a gain of 467,347) that had the largest numeric increases in 2024.

Put another way: The two states most likely to have uninsurable housing in the near future are the fastest-growing. In those states, as voting rolls attest, it’s the MAGAs who keep on coming to feed in the warmth. As with social media, the model of growth, it appears, is that the blind lead the blind. What a spectacle will be the future exodus of the tanned doofuses out of their idyll turned hellscape. And who knows the extent of the ramifying consequences of this colossal heat-driven migration? Look at the political transformation of Europe – toward xenophobia, nationalism, and, lately, fascism – in the wake of a mere four million refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war that began in 2011.

It may be that one of many ironies in the tragic course of the heating-driven crackup in American affairs is that the folks in the South will continue to labor under the delusion of being “real Americans,” salt o’ the earth, and so on, while we in the North are relegated to the status of arrogant airy-fairy intellectuals, the wine-bibbing liberals of Massachusetts who somehow enjoy shoveling snow. As Woody Allen put it in his description of his most beloved city of the East Coast, in Annie Hall, “Don’t you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers?” (“I think of us that way sometimes,” goes the punchline.)

***

A must-read riposte to this prejudiced thinking (which is more common than Woody’s joke allows us to imagine) comes courtesy of my colleague I.P.U. Freely, a New England resident and author of what should be a widely-read vulgarian polemic on American regionalist antagonisms, Fuck the South:

How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

‘Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment? Who do you think those wig-wearing, lacy-shirt-sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? [Eds. note: the writer is slightly out of his league here, given that Washington, Jefferson, and Mr. checks-and-balances himself, Madison, were Virginians – though Virginia, granted, is today an established blue state.]

No, No. Get the fuck out…We started this shit, so don’t get all uppity about how real you are, you Johnny-come-lately “Oooooh, I’ve been a state for almost a hundred years” dickheads…Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leeching, Confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

The claim of real Americanism is especially hollow when one looks at the enormous tax parasitism of Republican-leaning states on the Northern states, an argument that I.P.U. Freely makes central to his polemic. If we were to follow truly the ingenious recommendations of Elon Musk, then all the non-performing worthless Southern states would be cut off completely from federal funding, given their disgustingly inefficient poverty-stricken populations.

***

Of course, none of this petty resentment will matter when the Southrons have been driven North under the pressure of climate chaos and broad Earth system collapse. Will we in the North welcome the migrants from the Trump-voting Sun Belt? Will we embrace with open arms the scientifically illiterate, borderline cretinous, closeted but more often openly fascist Christian nationalists?

Would we in the North prefer them all to be shipped to Mars with Musk to die there while we keep Earth?

Of course we’d prefer that. But it would be un-American.

One of the basic principles of the Founding Fathers is the recognition that people are not angels, but are characterized by ignorance, arrogance, self-regard, and fevers of idiocy, and therefore cannot be trusted with power of any kind. The morons (including me) should be given the chance to express stupid thoughts and politically degenerate tendencies in the freest manner possible, but only when facilitated by a system of checks and balances in which no one moron gets the upper hand.

What we are seeing in the Trump administration, unfortunately, is the morons getting the upper hand. There is little to no connection to biophysical reality — the one reality that matters in the long run. We are in Amerikkka Sunbelt Fantasylandistan, the one where we can all shit ourselves in self-cleaning lawn chairs in a paradise of endless perfect warmth. It will end badly, but how badly depends on how much compassion we can reserve for the idiots among us.

Contrast the blindness about human numbers now commonplace on both left and right with the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech upon acceptance of the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966, King decried the “modern plague of overpopulation.” “Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary,” he said. “What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.”

During the heyday of family planning programs from 1960 through the mid-1990s — a progressive interregnum when pro-natalists seemed to lose the upper hand — much was made of the fact that handing out contraceptives and making abortion available did not lead necessarily to lowered rates of fertility. Such initiatives were necessary but not sufficient to reduce the number of children born in high fertility countries.

What was needed, as MLK made clear, was education. But it was a particular kind of education, targeted to both males and females, that emphasized that in a poor society there was an inordinate cost to having too many children: the lifelong burden it imposed, the health effects on mothers, the poverty in which it threatened to entrench parents, and the suffering it was likely to produce in children themselves, as society failed to expand services to meet the demands of exploding numbers.

The central tenet of family planning in its original iteration during the 1960-1995 period was the active promotion of E.F. Schumacher’s idea that small is beautiful, less is more, fewer babies means grown kids who are better treated, better educated, and better served by society, with parents who can better attend to them. The message was taught in community centers, schools, and people’s homes. It went out on television, radio, and in magazines, and was found on street posters, in brochures, on billboards, bumper stickers, coasters, calendars, and, in the case of Singapore, key chains. Typical slogans in India in the 1970s: “Have only two or three children, that’s enough”; “Big family: problems all the way; small family: happiness all the way.” In Bangladesh: “Boy or girl, two children are enough.” In South Korea: “Stop at two, regardless of sex.” In China: “Later, longer, fewer” — conceive later in adulthood, wait longer between pregnancies, and have fewer of them.

In 1977, researchers in the Matlab district of Bangladesh, a poor rural river-delta region, conducted a twenty-year field study comparing a control area where residents received only the basic family planning services available nationally and an experimental area that was provided a more proactive outreach program. The latter included “free services and supplies, home visits by well-trained female family-planning workers, and comprehensive media communication,” reported demographer John Bongaarts, vice president of the Population Council, in the journal Nature. “Outreach to husbands, village leaders and religious leaders addressed potential social and familial objections.” The benefits of what came to be known as comprehensive family planning, he concluded, were “clear-cut.”

“Contraceptive use jumped from 5% to 33% among married women of reproductive age in the experimental area. In the control area, little changed. As a result, fertility declined rapidly in the experimental area,” wrote Bongaarts. “Among the long-term consequences of this difference were the children in the experimental area being educated to higher levels, families having greater household assets, and the greater use of preventive health services.”

So it went in dozens of countries where comprehensive family planning was implemented, with total fertility rates plummeting and education, development, and per capita income rising — but only when the planning program included a broad public communications effort that actively sought to dissuade couples from having more than two kids.

By 1973, even a war criminal such as Robert McNamara, standing at the pinnacle of the national security and world government bureaucracy during the 1960s and 1970s, saw the unequivocal need for humane and voluntary family planning on a global scale. “The population problem,” said McNamara when he was president of the World Bank, “must be faced up to squarely and seen for what it is in fact — the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of the majority of the peoples in the developing world.” I happen to have on my shelf his slim 1973 book One Hundred Countries, Two Billion People (it has an air of innocence in a world that has passed eight billion), in which he reports that the successes of comprehensive family planning had shattered many of the myths that had arisen to buttress opposition to it. “This collection of myths obscure the essentials of the problem,” he remarked. “Worse still, it builds barriers to constructive action.”

McNamara noted, for example, the “generalized assumption that somehow ‘more people means more wealth’,” observing instead — and correctly — that “rapid population growth tends seriously to retard growth in per capita income,” so that “the developing nation soon discovers that its economic vigor is diminished rather than enhanced by the phenomenon of high fertility.” Similarly, he dismissed as “absurd” the much-trafficked notion that “family planning programs are sinister plots to coerce poor people into doing something they really do not want to do…The prevalence of voluntary illegal abortion should be enough to dispel that fiction.” (In India during 1973, according to McNamara, as many as a quarter million women were undergoing illegal abortions each month.) “The poor do not always know how to limit their families in less drastic and dangerous ways,” he wrote, “but there is overwhelming evidence that they would like to know how.”

Then he got to the crux of the matter:

All of us accept the principle that in a free society the parents themselves must determine the size of their own family. We would regard it as an intolerable invasion of the family’s rights for the state to use coercive measures to implement population policy…Millions of children are born without their parents’ desiring that it happen. Hence, a free, rational choice for an additional child is not made in these cases. If we are to keep the right of decision in the hands of the family, where it clearly belongs, we must give the family the knowledge and assistance required to exercise that right.

**

Twenty years later, at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo — which turned out to be a watershed moment in population politics — McNamara’s argument was turned on its head. The message in what came to be known as the Cairo Consensus was that for Westerners to suggest women have fewer babies was itself a tacitly coercive measure that objectified women’s bodies and violated their reproductive rights. Any demographic concern was a veil for “gendered power relations,” any talk of population control conjured a nefarious cabal of white male Western elites — a conspiracy of the McNamaras of the world promulgating a cold Malthusianism.

Jane O’Sullivan, an agricultural scientist and demographer at the University of Queensland in Australia, has observed that the turn toward identity politics at Cairo signaled a tragic lost opportunity. It also led to the rewriting of history into a false narrative. Given that some instances of human rights abuses had indeed occurred in the name of family planning — one-child-only policies in China after 1980, forced sterilization in India during the 1970s — the reproductive rights focus and elevation of women’s interests was widely welcomed, said O’Sullivan, but it should have been seen as synergistic with the demographic goals essential for socioeconomic development. Instead, she told me, “the architects of the new agenda recast the deeply humanitarian motives of the family planning movement as a predatory northern agenda against the global south.”

Diana Coole, a professor of political and social theory at the University of London, observed that post-Cairo any environmental argument for stabilizing human numbers was seen as “advancing misogyny, racism, eugenics, nationalism and colonialism.” According to Coole, “the population issue became not just a volatile field rent by competing geopolitical interests and ideologies but also a shameful, morally indefensible, discourse.” At the same time, she observed, “identity politics was silencing legitimate biodemographic worries.”

This silencing-by-identitarianism has had real-world consequences, none of them good. In the U.S., it took the form of environmental NGOs like the Sierra Club abandoning principled positions on stabilizing U.S. population because of the fraught issue of immigration, with manufactured charges of racism and xenophobia besetting organizations terrified of a backlash that would chase off donors. Internationally, funding for comprehensive family planning, which was always meager, dropped away in the 1990s as the Cairo Consensus took hold in policy rooms, and the programs were now seen not as integral to the development agenda but reduced to peripheral activities of health departments.

In many developing countries where average family sizes had been falling, the pace of fertility decline slowed down or stalled; in some countries such as Egypt and Indonesia, fertility rebounded and rose. Kenyan demographer Alex Ezeh documented the stall in East African countries, noting the massive impact on future population growth. By 2020, Kenya already surpassed the population it should have reached in 2050 if it had followed the UN’s 1998 projections, calculated before the stall was recognized. Since 2012, there has been some renewal of effort under the Family Planning 2020 project (now Family Planning 2030) instigated by Melinda Gates, but the program failed to raise contraceptive use faster than the growth in numbers of women with unmet needs. Meanwhile, the world faces an unrelenting increase of roughly 81 million people a year, with unintended pregnancies still greater than 40 percent globally.

Truth, O’Sullivan told me, has been the great casualty of Cairo. It’s well-documented that promotion of a small family norm is far more effective than investing in any indirect driver of fertility decline, such as educating girls or reducing poverty – yet this isn’t mentioned anymore. “Shifting the motivation for family planning from demographic concerns to women’s rights,” O’Sullivan told me, “has starved reproductive health services and undermined women’s rights.” Malcolm Potts, an obstetrician and family planning veteran from the University of California at Berkeley, reflected, “The ultimate tragedy is [that] Cairo has actually left women worse off.”

The greater tragedy is that the delay in fertility decline will have added billions to the global population by the time it peaks, considerably raising the risk of mass suffering and perhaps mass mortality events if current trends hold. The people whose numbers are growing the fastest, in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East primarily – and the growth there is due in no small part to the gutting of comprehensive family planning – will see their children and family members suffer the worst as the effects of population pressure and climate change compound each other.

There has been no subsequent International Conference on Population and Development since 1994, and the Cairo documents have been declared sacrosanct and unimpeachable. “The U.N. has not allowed any opportunity,” said O’Sullivan, “to interrogate its legacy.” In that context, it may be that the “anti-Malthusian” paradigm dominant today, driven by northern identity politics, is more of an imposition of northern ideology on poor people of the south than the family planning agenda ever was.

Years ago, I made it to the big time and was interviewed for a segment on one of the primetime television “news magazines.“ I spruced myself up, put on a suit coat, combed my hair and beard, all that nonsense – trying not to look like the backcountry slob that I am.

My father saw the segment and called me up. In his old age – this wasn’t long before he died, in his 80s – he had become gruff and rude, oblivious to people’s feelings, saying whatever he liked when he liked (which I admired).

“You looked and sounded like a big fuckin phony,” he said. “That wasn’t you up there.”

He was right, of course. There is a fundamental law of human behavior at play here, and it has to do with pointing cameras at people. Just as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle shows that observed particles will be altered by the act of observation, so it goes with Homo sapiens when you stick a camera in their face. Actively observed, your gestalt changes. You become, instantaneously, a big fuckin phony. I don’t know why this is so – some system dynamic in human psychology – but it is so; I’ve observed it hundreds of times in others, and so have you; and my father observed it in me.

We live now in an age when everyone is pointing cameras, mostly at themselves, and the effect is at once sad, distressing, and, as the kids say, cringe. Millions upon millions of people, capturing their visages in the digital slipstream and yapping into and out of screens, have transformed into the talking heads of TV yore that even as a young child one knew to be a world of fakers.

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Everyone knows what’s happening, because of the aforementioned inexplicable (it probably has an explanation, but I’m too lazy to look for it) programming of human psychology, which reveals to people even moderately self-aware that when you stick the camera in your face, trying to be real for your primetime moment, you know you are doing a disservice to your fellow humans by faking it.

(Countless online “journalists” have gone this route, that of the talk show; I urge them to reject the glib and shallow inquiry which the medium by its nature compels, and go back to the written word, the only communication that matters and that will last through the ages.)

Which brings me to the point of this dispatch: it turns out aliens do exist (not news) and for years (here’s the news) they’ve been watching and reviewing in detail billions of hours of Homo sapiens’ bloviations into cameras on social media and other platforms (e.g. YouTube, Substack).

They have built specially for the human race what they call a Pleaidean Mendacitometer (these folks hail from the Pleiades) that can measure non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation produced from mashing together, in a single wave, the sight and sound of every talking head on Earth blabbing at the same time. When they isolated this frequency of keening bullshit, via the Mendacitometer, they realized it was extremely dangerous.

According to published studies, when directed at Pleaidean test subjects, the frequency produced stunning immediate reductions in cognition, and, in the worst impacted subjects, “a patterned buzzing autistic form of enunciation” identified as “podcast speak.” The pattern consisted primarily of using the word “I” over and over.

Entrained thus in the frequency, test subjects not only became stupider but also, over time, more hideously narcissistic, and this effect continued even after exposure ceased, suggesting long-term brain damage.

The conclusion was that social media as a whole, which had led to the omnipresence of the podcast, the YouTube talk show, the selfie video and so on, constituted “an embarrassment to sentience everywhere and a toxic pollutant, which, if allowed to escape earth, could poison minds from Orion‘s Arm to the Galactic Center.”

It was decided, therefore, that the human race, having reached this level of mass communications, should be exterminated as a threat to intelligent life. At this very moment, Pleaidean death rays are powering up.

So there you have it: it won’t be nuclear fire or climate heating or eco-collapse that kills us out. It will be the endlessly growing chatter of the talking heads.

A few years ago I attended a carbon tax panel in Manhattan, the goal of which was to brainstorm ideas for reducing the carbon footprint of Americans. After the event was over, I pressed one of the panelists, Denis Hayes, the coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1970, who had alluded during the discussion to a troubling development in American environmentalism at the turn of the 21st century. On the matter of overpopulation, he said, a green silence prevailed. I asked Hayes whether he thought the United States was overpopulated. His reply was refreshingly honest. An American as a per capita unit should be defined, ecologically and environmentally, he said, as always having a rising footprint – and therefore we should have fewer Americans. “To be American is to be wasteful,” Hayes told me, and it’s “mighty difficult to get Americans to stop being wasteful.”

It is of course verboten today to discuss overpopulation, ecological footprint, and neoliberalism’s pathological attachment to population growth. A vast difference from thirty years ago, when the 1993 Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development, established by President Bill Clinton, reported that among the “most important steps the United States must take toward sustainability [is] to stabilize U.S. population promptly.”

In what was apparently the more sensible time of the 1990s, the Clinton task force considered growth of the U.S. population squarely in terms of ecological impact. The investigators warned that the number of Americans was growing at the alarming rate of “a Connecticut each year, or a California each decade.” “U.S. population is likely to reach 350 million by the year 2030; a level that would place even greater strain on our ability to…clean up pollution, alleviate congestion, manage sprawl, and reduce the overall consumption of resources.” (U.S. population is now set to surpass 350 million by 2030.)

A similar commission on population under Richard Nixon and chaired by his appointee John D. Rockefeller III came to similar conclusions. The Rockefeller commission on population growth, try though it did, could not find any convincing argument for having more Americans. The final report, published in March 1972, concluded that “in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from further growth of the nation’s population, rather that the gradual stabilization of our population through voluntary means would contribute significantly to the nation’s ability to solve its problems.” (Summed up another way, per filmmaker David Attenborough remarking in 2013 to the BBC: “I’ve never seen a[n environmental] problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.”) The commissioners appealed to their countrymen to abandon the “ideological addiction to growth” and the pro-natalist biases of our institutions. “The health of our country does not depend on population growth, nor does the vitality of business, nor the welfare of the average person.” The US population was then 213 million.

The Rockefeller commission was radical for its time, not least because of its prescriptions for female empowerment. It enraged social conservatives with the recommendation that women limit childbearing to two children. Public funding, the commission advised, should promote adoption, public provision for abortion should be available for all who seek it, and sex education programs should be made available in public schools along with universal access to contraception, including for minors. The commissioners also issued a full-throated call for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to enlist federal law in ending all sex-based discrimination in the U.S.

Commissions are fine and necessary, but people and corporations do what they want absent social pressure and legal regulation. Headlong growth, of the economy and of human numbers, did not stop in the 1970s, and growth isn’t stopping anytime soon. The United States has the dubious honor of being the third most populous nation after India and China. According to the latest census data, the U.S. is projected to grow by nearly 79 million people in the next four decades from roughly 326 million at present to 404 million as soon as 2060.

Given our ecological footprint – the per capita impact of hankering, striving, GDP-infusing, garbage-producing, crap-consuming, dreaming-the-dream Americans – it’s not surprising that the Sierra Club used to sell a bumper sticker that said, “The United States: The World’s Most Overpopulated Nation.” That the Sierra Club no longer offers to the public this commonsense observation is telling.

**

When Gaylord Nelson, the three-term U.S. senator from Wisconsin, conceived of Earth Day and coordinated with young activists such as Hayes to organize it, the “central theme,” as Nelson explained, “was the understanding that U.S. population growth was a joint partner in the degradation of our nation’s environmental resources. [W]e could not reach the environmental goals being set at the time if the United States did not quickly start stabilizing its population.”

Population stabilization was in fact central to the U.S. environmental movement beginning in the 1960s and held a place of prominence for more than thirty years. The evolution of this advocacy at major green groups like the Sierra Club is worth reviewing. By 1965, for example, the club recognized that “the population explosion” had “severely disturbed the ecological relationships between human beings and the environment,” and that what was needed was “a greatly increased program of education on the need for population control.” In 1969, the club “urged the people of the United States to abandon population growth as a pattern and goal” so that the nation could “achieve a stable population no later than the year 1990.”

By 1978, it had adopted the principle that “All developed nations, including the United States, being the countries with impact on the world development disproportionate to their population sizes, have an obligation…to end their population growth as soon as feasible.” Ten years later, the Sierra Club was openly calling for brakes on immigration, its platform stating:

Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.... The Sierra Club will lend its voice to the congressional debate on legal immigration issues when appropriate, and then only on the issue of the number of immigrants – not where they come from or their category, since it is the fact of increasing numbers that affects population growth and ultimately, the quality of the environment.

This was not controversial stuff. The Rockefeller commission on population had recommended the imposition of an immigration ceiling of 400,000 a year, given that population growth in the U.S. was then, as today, driven mostly by influxes from overseas. (U.S. birth rates since 1975 have averaged 1.9 children per woman, a little below the replacement level, but at roughly 1.2 million per year, legal immigration is three times the level that would ‘top up’ to replacement.) As late as 1993, the Clinton commission noted without caveat that “reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of…the drive toward sustainability.” The commission was optimistic about the nation’s capacity to “stabilize its population by addressing the determinants of growth with the sensitivity and forthrightness these issues deserve.”

**

Underpinning the concerns about the explosive growth of the human race was that it had the characteristics of a pathology. On the global as on the local scale, habitat loss, deforestation, biodiversity crash, and ecosystem simplification and depauperacy seems always to follow in the wake of massive increases in human numbers. (Large numbers also provide a petri dish for more infectious diseases more widely spread and mutating faster, as we’ve recently learned to our delight.)

In his 1993 paper, “A Theoretical View of Population Growth as a Sign of Pathology,” epidemiologist William Hern made explicit the cancer analogy. Hern posited that the “human species as a whole now displays all four major characteristics of a malignant process.” Population-growth-as-cancer has been routinely argued and dismissed. But consider Hern’s thesis.

We can see there has been rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues called ecosystems; metastasis, the colonization of remote regions by a species that seems always ready to jump into new places and take hold; and dedifferentiation, defined as the loss of distinctiveness in individual components -- which aptly describes the physical uniformity of the typical modern human habitat of concrete, glass and metal, as seen from New York to Tokyo to Dubai to Sao Paulo. (Beyond our cities, dedifferentiation applies to the natural world wherever there are humans, with wild habitats transformed to accomodate a limited suite of agricultural crops and domesticated animals.)

Hern believed that Homo sapiens’ intelligence, inventiveness, and ingenuity was the earth’s undoing: elastic adjustment to varying ecological conditions, warping those conditions to meet human needs; complex social arrangements that allow specialization and interdependencies among specialist groups; the brilliant technics that results from specialization; the development of trade, markets, commodity capitalism, especially fossil capitalism, as our big brains have been applied to the plundering and burning of ever more carbon – all of these enabled the pathological takeover of earth.

This genius for culture that sets us apart from other animals “plays the principal role in the transformation of human activities from noninvasive subsistence of a skinny primate in the late Pleistocene to a truly malignant process disrupting the planetary ecosystem.” Observing a map of London’s growth from 1800 to 1955 others might see a complexifying society that was becoming more rich and more dynamic but to Hern it looked “like nothing so much as an expanding, invasive, metastatic, malignant tumor.”

Take a look for yourself:

Advancing human culture, he tells us, has been nothing but a long death march for other-than-human lifeforms and ecosystems that had to make way for what he called Homo ecophagus, “a rapacious, predatory, omniecophagic species engaged in a global pattern of converting all available plant, animal, organic, and inorganic matter into either human biomass or into adaptive adjuncts of human biomass.” The cancer, assured Hern – and as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are now intending to prove – would likely spread extraterrestrially, with the 1969 moon landing an “anticipatory metastasis.”

**

Despite all, Hern maintained an optimistic view. There is a difference between us and cancer, he remarked in his 1993 paper: “we can think, and we can decide not to be a cancer.” The obstacle to having such agency consisted in “pro-natalist forces,” which (so he charged) were “in control of most human institutions.”

It’s tempting here to trot out the usual suspects: the Vatican and its opposition to contraception, relevant to the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics; the billions of Muslims and Hindus whose religions see women as vessels for baby-making and subordinate always to men; the tens of millions of Christian and Jewish fundamentalists who similarly view women as mere instruments of reproduction and home-making; the generally male-dominated societies in many developing countries, where cultural norms favor patriarchy; and so on. But let’s not discount the demands of profit-seeking capital to see a perpetual rise of population. More people means more consumers and also more available workers to keep wages low and put labor in cannibalizing competition with itself in the global race to the bottom. For humans to not be a cancer may be bad for big business.

And then of course there’s the broader speciesist context in which all culture is embedded. Thus celebrated books such as “Humans” – a kind of masturbatory anthropocentrism – sell because it’s easy to get the greatest species on earth to buy the fiction that we should continue to spread our greatness, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

In this vein, liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias has suggested with a straight face that the U.S. should aim for one billion Americans, all living the dream of high consumption, to serve as the massed fleshy bulwark in the struggle for global dominance against rising China. He makes no mention that barring a magical dematerialization of Americans’ outsized ecological footprint such an increase in our greatness would be catastrophic for earth.

Wilfully stupid or unconscionably ignorant, Yglesias seems to have learned nothing from past inquiries into the matter of U.S. population growth, apparently unaware that even during the Cold War, when concern about our slipping great power status in competition with the Soviets had reached its high point, an entire commission of Nixon appointees dismissed as primitive nonsense the notion that we should pack into the country as many bodies as possible. That most people in the cognoscenti today drink the pro-natalist Kool-aid from Yglesias and his ilk suggests that any sensible update of the Rockefeller commission of 1972, or of the 1993 Clinton commission, will not be forthcoming.

The oldest surviving literary endeavor, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” is also the first recorded progress narrative. In the story, the all-powerful, mountain-flattening demigod Gilgamesh, “awesome to perfection,” domesticates a hairy hominid named Enkidu, “a savage fellow from the depths of the wilderness,” plying him with bread and beer and offers of sex with a “voluptuous” woman. Once he becomes fully human, transformed into a tamer of lions and wolves, Enkidu joins with Gilgamesh to slay the guardian of the Cedar Forest, the terrible Humbaba, so that a city may be built from the felled timber.

The narrative glorifies an act of ecocide as necessary to cement Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s dominion over the natural world, leaving behind a metropolis as monument to their power. According to Samuel Miller McDonald, writing in his formidable first book “Progress: How One Idea Built Civilization and Now Threatens to Destroy It,” the story amounts to “a piece of propaganda” fashioned to justify a new relationship with the natural world, in which progress is equated with expansion of the “ecologically destructive” Sumerian city-states that arose in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago.

McDonald, a geographer and human ecologist, travels nimbly across this well-trod terrain. Jared Diamond, Lewis Mumford, Derrick Jensen and many others have indicted civilization — literally “life in cities” — as the starting point for kingship, hierarchy, inequality, war, slavery, conquest and disease. (Diamond famously called agriculture, the sine qua non of life in cities, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”)

McDonald’s contribution is to frame the story of the curse of civilization via a helpful lesson on the many ways that organisms capture energy for survival in the natural world. He singles out three types of energy capture: mutualist, commensalist and parasitic. The first involves species that mutually benefit each other, such as when bees drink the nectar of plants they help pollinate. Commensalism occurs when the relationship is neither beneficial nor harmful, such as when birds nest in trees. Parasitism is clear enough: It’s the tick, the leech, the intestinal worm, an organism extracting energy to the detriment of its host.

“The new types of societies that arrived with the first empires,” writes McDonald, “were extracting and expanding rapidly, to the detriment both of the ecological diversity in their region and certain members of these societies.” These “parasitic societies” …

… harmed the fertile soils by overproduction, they harmed the once lavish forests and the species that called them home by cutting down the trees, and they harmed the classes of workers, slaves, and soldiers deployed to toil and make war and die on behalf of small groups of elites, new semidivine rulers at the apex of their economies. Instead of operating within local carrying capacities, they expanded beyond the naturally occurring energetic limits of a given ecological system. When the limits to the extraction of resources are exceeded, the parasitic system must either suffer a crash or must invade and take the energy of a more distant ecology or society.

Not only was “Gilgamesh” the first piece of literature in Western history, writes McDonald, it was the first to celebrate the parasitic society. Thousands of years later, as industrial Homo sapiens overwhelms the biosphere with technological systems and the energy needed to sustain them, we are as trapped as ever in this model of violent extraction. And while we can assert indisputably that “progress” for the chosen species has meant longer and healthier lives for some of us, and greater affluence (for some), and less suffering (for some), the relationship with the natural world remains parasitic, its impact on our other-than-human brethren one of relentless horrors.

Today the consequences of that relationship, as a growing chorus of scientists has made clear, likely include self-destruction. The levels of energy capture, along with the outflow of toxic effluents, have grown so great they threaten to kill the host. A few statistics paint the grim picture of the parasite’s progress. Of all the mammals in the world, wild mammals account for just 4% of total biomass. The other 96% consists of humans and our domesticated animals bred for slaughter. In 1900 the total mass of civilization was equal to about 3% of global biomass. Today, the mass of concrete, glass, constructed wood, metal, plastics and machines of all kinds — our built environment — “is greater than all life on the planet, all plants, all animals, all bacteria,” according to McDonald. Collectively, the animals on Earth weigh approximately 4 gigatons — but plastics now total 8. With crashing biodiversity, Homo sapiens is increasingly alone in a depauperate landscape. “Humanity alone is nothing,” McDonald observes. “Rather, it is worse than nothing; alone in a once-diverse world, it is a grotesque, bloated ape seated on a throne of corpses.”

The author offers no clear path out of parasitism, nor should we expect him to. It may be that we are trapped in civilizational path dependence, unable to change course. He concludes his book with a tonic dose of realism based on the known biophysical limits to growth of the human enterprise.

“I can’t give you hope,” he writes, “wouldn’t delude you with it if I could, but I can just about guarantee that there will come a time when there is too little energy, both living carbon and fossilized carbon, to run the engine of this vast parasitic global network. There will be no more space to expand into and no more resources to extract. When that day comes, this network will fracture.”

On that day, the march of progress will have arrived at its end, having effectively committed suicide.

Doomscrolling, an addictive habit, can be destructive if not managed – the way an alcoholic, say, manages drinking herself to death. It must be done with care, with binges considered for the long haul. “Overindulging…may be detrimental to your mental health,” warns the doomscrolling subreddit r/Collapse. “Anxiety and depression are common reactions when studying collapse…If you are considering suicide….” (If you are considering suicide: this may end up one of the mantras of the era of modern civilizational crack-up.)

“Maybe typing the whole thing out will be therapeutic,” writes an r/Collapse commenter in a post titled How I think the future will play out, which he/she intended as a prediction of events unfolding in the worst of all possible futures. It was one of the doomiest posts I found in months hanging around r/Collapse. I reproduce it here only slightly edited and with its lousy grammar intact.

First off, writes the doomer, “There will be crop failures which will get worse and worse, food prices will soar….Because of crop failures and water shortages, there will be more mass migrations, which will make the 2010s migrations look tame. It’ll be like the Syrian refugee crisis but MUCH worse.”

“But, the world hasn’t ended yet, we’re still in the 2020s…Wars over resources, rise of nationalism, rampant polarization, rampant criminality, martial law, civil wars, the loss of basic human rights…I guess you could say that society [is] in a state of crisis.”

The writer offers a funeral oration for each of the decades to come. “If society doesn’t collapse in the 2030s, the surviving nations will be horrible places to live and are barely getting by or rather slowly rotting from the inside and out, failed nations will be warzones and the people who still live there (those who have not migrated) would live a life similar to Mad Max.”

By the 2040s, “If any civilization still exists in the north it is hanging on by a thread. Feedback loops like hot oceans, burning forests, rotting soil [huh? – ed’s note], thawing permafrost and others are increasing temperatures at an increasingly fast rate, the situation is like a rock rolling off the cliff but now it is falling and nothing can be done to stop it.”

By the 2050s, “best case scenario there could be a few hundred million people in total left living in the tip of south america and in the arctic north. But as time goes on, many if not all will die of starvation and violence.”

By the 2070s, my teen-aged daughter will be in her mid-60s. I am told at r/Collapse that by then she will be reduced to a dispersed ash in Plasticene soil. “The oceans are boiling, the air is toxic and unbreathable…It is now too hot for humans to survive, there is no food left…no fresh water to sustain you…There will be nothing left of us…we will all become part of the layers of plastic and everything else compressed into the dirt…For the price of apathy, inertia, and carelessness, hell will ultimately be realized.”

The stuff of apocalyptic prophecy, a wiping clean of the slate, the end of all humanity, but a tale that doesn’t have the benefit of Revelation, because in the end there will be no redemption.

The writer talks about “typing the whole thing out” as a form of soothing. Collapsitarian culture is an outpouring of grief, an expression of existential distress over ecological disorder. Psychologists have come up with a term for this type of grief: solastalgia, a mourning for the perceived disappearance of the “normal,” “stable,” “healthy” natural world. The precise definition is “the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment.” Nostalgia we know well: it is the pain when we are away from the familiar, uprooted from home ground. Solastalgia is the pain when home collapses around us, home being all earth, a total falling apart the thing we most fear.

It may be that solastalgia, a hypersensitivity to the threat of collapse of the only home we know or will ever know, is a necessary condition for humanity’s longterm survival. Collapsitarians are ahead of the curve in feeling deeply the pain of ecological crisis and seeing with not entirely clear eyes, but with eyes wide enough, the existential nature of the crisis. If the most extreme among them sound like mad prophets, then we who deny the seriousness of the crisis, who think everything’s going to be alright by our embrace of an unfounded optimism, are the deceivers.

From the actual scientists on the doomscroll (as opposed to the prognosticators in the desert of Mad Max), one gets the sense that the end – an end – of business-as-usual is built into our current trajectory. The late Will Steffen, who was one of Australia’s top climate scientists until his death in 2023, at age 75, remarked that as industrial society has already passed 9 of 15 Earth system tipping points, this could set into a motion a process at the end of which “collapse of civilization is the most likely outcome.”

Have a look at a small sample of the scroll for the months of October and November. Australian oceans face an “uncharted future,” two of three corals in its world-heritage listed Ningaloo reef now dead, while the country’s possums show some of the highest levels of PFAS chemicals to be found in small mammals. Two iconic coral species off the Florida coast were discovered to be “functionally extinct,” as the planet’s first “catastrophic climate tipping point” has been reached as coral reefs across the oceans suffer “widespread dieback.” A third of British farmers made no profit in the past year, facing “extreme floods and droughts that have led to some of the worst harvests on record.” There were deadly floods in Mexico, Nepal and Vietnam, where 100,000 people were driven from their homes. Overarching all this, carbon emissions from fossil fuels in 2025 hit a record high. Scientists writing in the journal BioScience report that “We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are flashing red….This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing.”

The doomscroll is also a historical recordkeeping. It reminds us, for example, to read an essay from 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about how massive biodiversity loss, unprecedented in human history and accelerating every minute, amounts to “annihilation” and portends “a dismal picture of the future of life, including human life.” We are urged to remember the landmark 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, considered the most comprehensive global environmental review ever conducted, which found that “human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” We are asked to recall Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical. “Doomsday predictions,” said the pope,” can no longer be met with irony or disdain.” We are directed to Chris Hedges, who as a New York Times correspondent reported on the implosion of the Soviet Union and civil wars globally, who tells us that “you have to have lived in societies that have collapsed to realize how quickly they go down and how fragile they are. There’s an emotional incapacity to understand collapse, even when it’s facing you.”

From Hedges to a crash course in r/Collapse history, in which the diligent reader learns about the Classic Maya collapse, the collapse of the Roman Empire, the collapse of the Chaco Puebloans in the American southwest, the collapse of Easter Island, and so on — the monstrous historical failures of “civilized” people on parade.

**

The depth of the extreme risk humanity now faces was made clear by actuaries and climate scientists partnered at the University of Exeter in a report issued this year. The members of the university’s school of actuaries included advisors to governments, corporations, and pension and sovereign wealth funds. “Traditional risk management techniques,” they wrote, “typically [miss] network effects and interconnections.” As a consequence, policymakers are “likely to significantly understate the potential impact of climate and nature risks” on an environmentally “insolvent” Earth.

What did the actuaries say about our current trajectory? A 2C rise by 2050 — which is now credibly forecast — could see a 25 percent drop in world GDP, an economic depression the likes of which the world has never seen, as global trade crashes to a halt and national economies shatter. For context, world GDP fell during the Great Depression by an estimated 15 percent between 1929 and 1932.

They projected a catastrophic disruption of food supply, as large parts of Earth become uncultivable and uninhabitable, with the result that some two billion people could die on a 2C-warmed planet. “Mass mortality, mass displacement, severe economic contraction and conflict” – the expected new normal at 2C, according to the Exeter team.

If the course toward 3C is unchanged, our civilization risks suffering and death on an immense scale: four billion dead between 2060 and 2090, along with a 50 percent drop in world GDP. A climate slaughterhouse too horrific to think about. The actuaries noted that “no realistic plan [is] in place to avoid this scenario.”

Which is all to say that the mad prophets are not so far off from a plausible vision of what’s to come.

I doubt this is so.

I suspect that human individual importance is surpassingly tiny, approaching the infinitesimal, and to think otherwise is the sickness of our species, the pathology of anthropocentrism. The lesson of nature is that the meaning of any specimen among any species is neither to be honored nor disregarded. We are animals colliding with chance, nothing more.

Alas, with Homo colossus, no such humility. Therefore we celebrate our birthdays and proclaim ourselves significant, the chosen ones, as if the particular birth of you or me is anything beyond a biological happenstance. This primary error of self-regard quickly leads to epic foolery: the topping of hills with Parthenons and oracles; conquest of mountains, grasslands, forests, and deserts; the metastasis of cities of death (concrete, glass, metal); the pollution of every possible land base and toxification of every drop of water (microplastics — drink it up!) to serve the colossus’ foul habits; the loading of rockets full of cumshot to the moon and beyond; and so on.

We have convinced ourselves of this man-is-the-center-of-all-things nonsense since the Enlightenment. Time to correct the error.

Therefore a poem for all our birthdays…

Man is not the center of all things

(for Robinson Jeffers and Jonathan Swift)

Man is not the center of all things; but he is a shithead.
By that I mean he’s got his head filled with the feces
Of his looking in the mirror.
I know, that’s all I do, look in the mirror..

Here’s Man in the canyon nearby, the sun blazing,
The water running, the sky cloudless:
He squeezes out his turd, squat as an angel,
proclaims that it looks like him –
Proclaims he has given birth! –
And molds it under the blue sky: This shit is his,
It’s got his name on it, the shit looks likes his fist –
It’s a shit-fist! It’s darling, this fist,
It’s better than all loves and trysts.
It’s the awaking of his higher self,
It’s a pin he can wear,
It’s a flag, it’s a name, it’s what sets him apart
From the other shitting creatures who wisely
want no more of it.

Shit-Man has a festival. He makes music
Of his dried turds on a rock
And sells tickets.
He jumps and cries, he fingers it,
He trembles, he murmurs, he babbles.
He calls it a play, a poem, a book.
He runs to the stream and wonders why the water
Runs clean – shouldn’t it be full of shit?
The enormity of sky in morning should be shitting
Free as I am, but it doesn’t.

I have created this turd Word
And all you have, God, is the dawn
Which doesn’t shit?
God, I have feces that can smear letters
On your creation faster than your magpies and coyotes
Scream for a place under the weather.
I can shit and make weather!
I can fuck and shit at the same time!
Who in your Creation, God, can do as I?

Let me tell ya
(no God answering)
I shit in your mouth,
I shit on your cousins, your brothers and sisters,
your grandfathers and uncles,
Your friends, your loveliest friends,
I shit and fuck and shit and fuck,
And what are you, God, to do?
Look at the mountain where I have my toilet:
My shit has dreams made of cities.
My shit is the raging of data centers.
My shit is the white light of Zoom and Facetime.
Look at the green-stripped trees where I can have more.
Look at the fine flesh of the little woman grass where I eat Your world.
Look at the rivers where I drink and You can’t.
Look at the boundless prairies where I make bread
And no grass grows except where I tell it
To fill the guts of men who smile and shit.
Look at the warm white ocean where all fish swim to me (not to You!).

Look at the teeming frost of the north which is full of oil
Black as shit.
Look at the time I impose until the world boiling
Can be cooked for me and me only.
I am the greatest thing ever – don’t You know?

A long time back, I was a writer for Hustler Magazine (I got my start as a journalist working for porn mags) and covered, among other things, “national security” (so-called), the war-and-death complex (er, defense, sorry), and, not least, foreign intel operations on U.S. soil. Post 9/11, I focused on Israel, given the push by that country and Zionists in the Bush administration to mire the U.S. in endless war in the Middle East. As the tide has now turned — American support for Israel, reports the New York Times, “has undergone a seismic reversal” — I figured I’d share with you an oldie but goodie, a piece I published in Hustler in 2010 titled “The Israelis Next Door.” It’s dated, of course, but this history needs to be told and re-told. The Israelis are not our friends.

THE ISRAELIS NEXT DOOR: HOW ISRAEL PENETRATES THE US GOVERNMENT TO CONTROL AMERICAN POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel’s military dominance in the Middle East depends on the continual feeding of billions of dollars in US aid, more than $140 billion since the Jewish state’s inception in 1948 – and any change in that lopsided status quo terrifies the Israelis. So it goes without saying that knowing and swaying US policy by any means is a necessity for Israel’s survival as the regional hegemon. Israel’s intelligence and political action network in the United States – a network whose purpose is to get deep inside the government and push US policy toward Israeli national interests, even if it hurts America – is unrivaled by any other foreign power. This is a surprising fact given that Israel is no enemy of the US, but one of its chief allies. “It’s sickening how much reach the Israelis have here,” a veteran CIA officer tells Hustler. Another former CIA officer, author Michael Scheuer, puts it more bluntly: The US and Israel, he says, “have an intimate relationship – as long as Americans are happy being raped.”

Examples abound of the intricacies of Israeli penetration into the US, but here’s a recent one, and it’s an instant classic: In 2005, the National Security Agency secretly wiretapped conversations between Rep. Jane Harman and an unnamed Israeli intelligence agent, who offered the California Democrat a sweet deal. The agent promised to secure Harman the prized chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee if she intervened on behalf of two suspected Israeli spies facing jail-time in a Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution.

One naturally wonders how a foreign intelligence operative would have the sway in Congress to fix appointments like chairmanships. Look no further for explanation than the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerhouse lobby that funnels millions of dollars into Congressional elections to insure that pro-Israel congresspeople get elected and stay elected. AIPAC, which conducts its work ostensibly as a legal lobby group, has long been suspected as a front operation for Israeli covert action – in other words, as a group engaged in illegal activities gathering intelligence and running operations against the US government.

What was revealed in the Israeli agent’s conversation with Harman in 2005, first reported in Congressional Quarterly magazine last April, was stunning. At the time, two veteran policy players at AIPAC, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, were under indictment on charges of passing to Israel classified information gleaned from a mole inside the Pentagon. The secrets Rosen and Weissman had slipped into Israeli hands specifically concerned US policy vis-à-vis Iran, a subject today in the Obama Administration as hot as it’s ever been, with pro-Israel lobbyists pushing hard for a US attack on the Iranian mullahs. According to the DOJ indictment, Rosen was an old hand at spying: He was suspected of passing code-word protected classified information to the Israelis as early as 1999. For her part, Harman was asked to pressure the DOJ to reduce the charges against the two men. She happily assented, saying she’d “waddle into” the case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to the transcript.

In addition to his handing Harman the committee chairmanship, the Israeli agent promised to funnel campaign contributions to help out the re-election of Harman’s fellow California Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, today the speaker of the House. The source of the campaign cash? Media billionaire Haim Saban, the chief money-man behind the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. It’s unknown whether Harman – who concluded her phone call with the Israeli agent by saying “This conversation doesn’t exist” – did in fact intervene in the case. But on May 3 the DOJ unceremoniously dropped the charges against the two AIPAC staffers, who went free – presumably to continue spying against the US. Harman, who herself should have been investigated, remains an elected representative of the American people, and it’s as if the incident never happened.

Big money infused into the political system, secrets stolen from the Pentagon, quasi-criminal collusion with a congresswoman – it’s all a day in the life of the Israeli intelligence-and-influence machine as US law enforcement and the media look the other way. How would the US react if some other country’s intelligence apparatus behaved this way? Forget North Korea, forget Hamas; would there be total silence if South Korea, China, or Brazil did this? How about Egypt, the Saudis, or the Palestinians? Our elected officials would be screaming, and journalists would spread it through every news source available – as they should.

‘DON’T GET MAD AT THE ISRAELIS!’

In his explosive 1974 book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” former CIA officer and agency whistleblower Victor Marchetti details how a competent spy service works to pursue the “national interest” overseas via covert action, which he defines as “attempting to influence the internal affairs of other nations by covert means.” Marchetti writes that the efficient way to conduct covert action is not through violent intervention – the bloody work of mounting coups or funding insurgents – but through the soft touch of “penetrations.” This involves building propaganda outlets in the media using sympathetic journalists; financing political parties and making sure the “right” people get into office; placing “agents of influence” as intellectuals and scholars, often gathered in “thinktanks”; and, not least, tapping into the telecommunications system to establish electronic surveillance.

Some CIA officers these days will admit to a grudging respect for the success Israel has achieved in checking off this covert action list. “They’re doing a great job,” says ex-CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson. “They’re running a terrific campaign in the US, both covert and overt. I don’t get mad at Israel. Just as I wouldn’t get mad at a dog for licking its balls because he can.”

Let’s run through the checklist and see how Israel fares.

FINDING FRIENDS IN THE MEDIA

Pro-Israel pundits are salted throughout the US media – just look at the kowtowing to right-wing Israeli interests on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post – but it’s especially important to have a Zionist voice on “America’s most trusted source for news,” the vaunted CNN. Before rising as CNN’s star anchor, Wolf Blitzer worked for AIPAC, and then for the Jerusalem Post. He wrote a book-length apologia about Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who in the 1980s compromised US national security more than perhaps any other spy in the last 30 years. He once traveled the American TV talk show circuit announcing himself as the “voice of Israel.” Journalist Robert Friedman charged in the New York Review of Books that Blitzer is in fact an Israeli citizen, but it’s not true: Blitzer has an American passport – which, from a covert action standpoint, makes him a more effective asset.

CRASHING CASH INTO POLITICAL PARTIES

During the 2008 election cycle, pro-Israel political action committees, or PACs, contributed some $3.6 million to Congressional candidates, both Democratic and Republican – making pro-Israel campaign contributions the second largest, eclipsed only by the $4 million in PAC money from the National Association of Realtors. Fortune Magazine rates the Israel lobby as the #1 foreign policy lobby, while the lobby’s chief arm of operations, AIPAC, regularly attracts to its annual conference the most powerful representatives and senators in Congress as billed speakers (and let’s not forget that just about every presidential candidate during the 2008 elections made the pilgrimage to speak before AIPAC).

AIPAC watchdog Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, suggests that AIPAC is no run-of-the-mill political action group. “I am most troubled by AIPAC’s history of subverting rule of law in America,” he tells Hustler. The habit of lawlessness goes back to the founding of AIPAC in 1951, when the DOJ, under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), sought to register the group formally as a propagandist for a foreign power. But AIPAC was never forced to comply with the FARA regulations. This was due mostly to the influence and money it pumps into the American political system. “In 1984 AIPAC obtained a classified government report it used to negotiate a highly damaging trade agreement with the US,” says Smith, reviewing the history of AIPAC’s criminal activity. “In the late 1980’s AIPAC was found to have ‘probably’ violated federal election laws in forming and directing PAC expenditures to favored candidates.” What’s more, according to Smith, AIPAC has helped Israeli arms manufacturers violate U.S. intellectual property rights, while endangering Americans as Israel trafficks stolen military systems intelligence to third countries. In his 2007 book “Foreign Agents,” Smith charges that AIPAC has effectively laundered money to disguise the financial support given by U.S groups, both Jewish and Christian, to continue the construction of new illegal settlements in the West Bank. “AIPAC has corrupted US governance to advance the interests of a foreign state,” says Smith.

GETTING THE “RIGHT” PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT

When in the spring of 2009 a veteran diplomat named Charles Freeman, who has long experience in the Middle East, was named by the Obama Administration to chair the National Intelligence Council – a key position in determining US foreign policy – the Israel lobby went on the attack. Freeman’s crime was that throughout his career he had offered an honest assessment of Israel’s reprehensible behavior in the Occupied Territories and its damaging effect on US standing in the Arab world. Steve Rosen, the accused spy employed by AIPAC, had the chutzpah to spearhead the attack on Freeman, who in March resigned from the post, with Barack Obama uttering not a peep in his defense. In the wake of his withdrawal, Freeman issued a blistering public statement: “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views.”

So the “anti-Israel” Freeman is dumped from the Obama Administration, while the pro-Israel players are everywhere. To take just two examples: White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was a staunch supporter of Israel during his time as a representative in Congress and, when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, showed his patriotism by signing up – for the Israeli Defense Forces. Meanwhile, Obama’s special envoy to Iran Dennis Ross, a US diplomat who became known in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for his consistent pro-Israel bias, has sided with AIPAC in pushing for aggressive US action against Iran – which suggests he’s the wrong choice for furthering American interests in the Middle East.

BUILDING THINKTANKS

Powerful thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for a New American Century, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs all seek to advance Israel’s interests by influencing Congress and the executive branch. Top players in these thinktanks have included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, leading intellectuals in pushing the Bush Administration to invade Iraq – an invasion and occupation which arguably benefited Israeli hard-right Likudniks while ensnaring the nation in what one decorated Army general called “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history.” Meanwhile, Feith, Wolfowitz, and Perle were each at one time in their careers investigated for passing US secrets to Israel – but were never indicted.

TAPPING THE TELECOM NETWORK

Israeli wiretapping companies with close connections to the Israeli intelligence services, particularly the Mossad, provide their hardware and software to the National Security Agency for the electronic surveillance of American citizens. Journalist James Bamford, an expert on the NSA, reports these Israeli firms can access all kinds of data gathered up by the NSA. The upshot: If the US government is vacuuming up your phone calls and e-mails in flagrant violation of Constitutional protections, so are the Israelis. The implications are huge and troubling, says a former high level Bush Administration counterintelligence official who spoke with Hustler. “American citizens,” says the Bush Administration official, “could be losing confidential business and proprietary information that could cause loss of jobs, patent, intellectual property, and cause the disclosure of politically sensitive information.”

**

So Israel is in fact doing a wonderful job at watching out for its national interest, per the CIA’s recommended modus operandi. Why doesn’t the United States government do the same by taking action to stamp out Israeli interference on American soil? The former Bush Administration official suggests an answer: Money. Congress has the oversight power for tasking law enforcement to take on Israel’s covert and overt activities. But Congress, as Senator J. William Fulbright once famously said, is “Israeli-occupied territory.”

“I lived in the Israeli-occupied territory for many years,” says the former Bush Administration intelligence official. “They own it lock, stock and barrel. You have all these people on Capitol Hill whose campaigns are funded by groups representing a foreign power. Well, the only purpose of AIPAC is to promote the welfare and the security of that foreign power.”

“It’s the money in the system that’s so corrupting,” the official says. “Where the system is being abused – where it starts to break down and fail to work the way the framers intended – is when the 2 or 3 percent of the country, the pro-Israel people, outspends by a thousand-to-one any other lobby. When AIPAC says, we want something, Congress salutes and says, ‘How much and what color?’ The American people need to know the truth about this.” The Bush Administration intelligence official even suggests – though the allegation has never been fully investigated – that Israel has illegally used US foreign aid by laundering it back into the US as campaign contributions in Congress. This, if true, would mean the US literally is being slapped in the face with its own money.

For years I’d been living in villages and cabins in deserts and mountains, most recently in the Catskills, until the sad day earlier this year when family matters forced me back to my natal ground, New York City. I’d departed a decade ago hoping never to come back. The outrageous cost of living, the yuppification of the city, its degeneration and degradation into Mayor Bloomberg’s “luxury product,” and the death-grip held by the FIRE sector (finance-insurance-real estate) was cementing NYC in the status quo of injustice and inequality envisioned long ago by dissident economist Scott Nearing: “Myriads of serfs or ill-paid wage earners do the work; business managers, stewards and officials do the trading. Members of the imperial ruling class are the money-lenders; the investors; the land owners; the idle rich…”

But now here comes democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, promising to tax the rich, rein in our sky-high rents, and take FIRE down a notch in this our second Gilded Age of rot and lies and corruption. The insurgent candidate looks set to win the mayor’s race while hatred and fear of him has spread in the ranks of the city’s billionaire oligarchs (who are joined, of course, by the most gilded New Yorker of all, Donald Trump, who has vowed to starve the city of federal funding if Mamdani wins).

The fact of so many elites wanting him to lose indicates to me Mamdani’s doing something right. So I’m back in town just in time to cast my ballot for him – and to see what he can put together policy-wise to make life as painful as possible for those folks and ensure their enmity for him is not misplaced. About time we had a mayor of New York who isn’t a straight-up catamite for the parasitic rich.

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I’m reminded of the 1886 mayoral campaign of Henry George, who also ran as an insurgent (in his case challenging both the Republicans and the Tammany Hall-backed Democratic candidate) and was perceived as a danger to the city’s monied interests. George had become a national sensation with the 1879 publication of his best-selling treatise on political economy, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth. The book had arisen out of the paradox that George observed while covering for newspapers the breakneck expansion of the country: there were more poor people, in more desperate conditions, wherever industry had arisen and capital accumulated.

Land monopoly, George asserted, was the reason progress brought greater poverty. As American civilization advanced, as population grew and aggregated in and around cities, land became scarce, prices soared, and the majority who had to live on the land paid those prices to the minority who owned it. For the laboring classes, rent slavery was the result. “To see human beings in the most abject, the most helpless and hopeless condition,” George wrote, “you must go, not to the unfenced prairies and the log cabins of new clearings in the backwoods, where man singlehanded is commencing the struggle with nature, and land is yet worth nothing, but to the great cities where the ownership of a little patch of ground is a fortune.”

In 2010, writing for Harper’s Magazine, I dove into George’s story, including his rise to prominence with Progress and Poverty, his program to address land monopoly, and his race for the mayor’s office:

According to George, the sequestering of valuable land assets in private hands was itself the product of a system of property “as artificial and as baseless as the divine right of kings.” “Historically, as ethically,” he wrote, “private property in land is robbery. . . . It has everywhere had its birth in war and conquest.”

George noted that many premodern tribes recognized no right of land ownership; the tribesman’s property was the bow and arrow he built with his hands, not the land he hunted on. Nor was such a right recognized under the laws of the Old Testament, in which land was “treated as the gift of the Creator to his common creatures.” Moses had, after all, instituted the jubilee, under which land was redistributed every fifty years, and the debts incurred against land were canceled—a tradition ended by Roman rule. Everywhere George reviewed the annals of the precapitalist world, he saw the “struggle between this idea of equal rights to the soil and the tendency to monopolize it in individual possession.”

By the nineteenth century, however, the “superstition” of “absolute individual property in land,” represented by the complex array of state-sanctioned deeds and titles, had become fundamental to the American legal system. It could not be crushed—nor should it be, said George. Land seizure and nationalization, he believed, would lead to tyranny. “Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land.” George would not revoke the right to buy and sell property or to will land to one’s descendants. Instead he argued that society might leave landowners “the shell” of their holdings if it could “take the kernel.” As George wrote, “It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. . . . In this way the State may become the universal landlord without calling herself so.”

Rent was the key. In line with classical economics from the time of Adam Smith, George defined rent as the unearned income owners derived from the rising value of land, meaning it was distinct from the labor that went into property in the form of improvements, the construction of homes and offices and factories, and the cultivation of fields. A community’s productivity was the invisible hand that caused land values to increase. The cabin in the woods became a prize when a mine opened up across the field, a road linked the cabin to the mine, a country store opened to supply the miners, more homes were built, a railroad came in, a town was born. The land under the cabin derived its worth from what society built around it. Its increase in value therefore belonged to society, and George said this value was to be assessed and taxed at market rates. This “single tax” on land and natural resources offered a reform of capitalism that “open[ed] the way to a realization of the noble dreams of socialism.”

One can imagine the horror of New York’s landed rentiers at hearing George’s proposal for a land-value tax. The Astors, the Beekmans, the Phippses, the Stuyvesants, the Roosevelts, and, later, the Tishmans, Rudins, Roses, Minskoffs, Dursts, and the Fisher and Tisch brothers, and, still later, Fred Trump and his foul spawn — all families that got rich from the unearned income of the rising value of land. George wanted to siphon away that parasitic wealth, an early attempt at Keynes’ “euthanasia of the rentiers.”

From the Harper’s piece:

Georgism, as it came to be known, was denounced by wealthy landowners as the most radically lunatic notion of its time, and the single tax as more insidious than all the writings of Karl Marx put together. The Catholic Church ruled George’s thought “worthy of condemnation.” Yet within five years of the publication of Progress and Poverty, hundreds of thousands of Americans would come to believe in the gospel of the single tax. In New York City, the populist priest Father Edward McGlynn referred to George simply as “this prophet . . . this messenger from God.” Mark Twain proselytized as a Georgist, as did the philosopher John Dewey. “It would require less than the fingers of the two hands,” wrote Dewey, “to enumerate those who, from Plato down, rank with Henry George among the world’s social philosophers.”

Leo Tolstoy proclaimed that George would “usher in an epoch.” “The method of solving the land problem has been elaborated by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that, under the existing State organization and compulsory taxation, it is impossible to invent any other better, more just, practical, and peaceful solution,” wrote Tolstoy. “The only thing that would pacify the people now is the introduction of the system of Henry George.”

In 1886, the United Labor Party, fresh from the battles and boycotts of the first May Day, nominated George as its candidate for mayor of New York. His campaign offered a radical vision for the time: wherever railroads, telegraphs, telephones, and gas, water, electric, and heating utilities could be operated more efficiently at scale, as “natural monopolies,” the public would own them; transit in New York would be made free for all; city government would be responsible for social services; he would end child labor and mandate an eight-hour workday. The land-value tax would pay for his programs.

Though not a single major newspaper endorsed him, clubs were founded in George’s name in twenty-four districts across the city. Members financed his campaign, each contributing twenty-five cents, and George, in between sixteen-hour days of speeches and rallies, sat at headquarters rolling coins for distribution to his workers. The coalition he built with the ULP was big-tent, crossing lines of class, ethnicity, and religion that had long divided New York. Three days before the election, his supporters—merchants, lawyers, doctors, tailors, plumbers, cigar makers, brassworkers, Germans, Irish, Russians, Poles, Italians, Jews—gathered by the tens of thousands in lower Manhattan. They carried banners reading HONEST LABOR AGAINST THIEVING LANDLORDS, and at Tompkins Square, in driving rain, they chanted, “Hi! Ho! The leeches must go!”

The leeches, of course, ran New York City, from top to bottom and across both parties, and for them George was a barbarian at the gate who had to be stopped. When he lost the election, George’s supporters suspected that Democrats and Republicans colluded to “count him out” by “grossly tampering with the election returns and misrepresenting them,” according to one account. “And this is precisely what was done, if the testimony of numerous eye-witnesses is to be believed. The Labor Party, it is quite clear, was deliberately cheated out of an election won in the teeth of the severest and most corrupt opposition.”

The polls going into today’s election show Mamdani leading his nearest rival, the execrable Andrew Cuomo, by double digits. It’s a solid bet he will win. It’s also a solid bet that once he’s in office, elites will embark on a campaign of sabotage to make sure that New York’s first democratic socialist mayor crashes and burns.

Floating along on my bicycle in the daydream of a country road, up behind me came a man on a hissing e-bike, going fast, headed somewhere important. I thought perhaps at that speed – 25 miles an hour, I estimated – and with dusk gathering, he risked hitting a bear who would promptly eat him and the bike. But no such luck.

I saw him later at the crest of the hill that I’d climbed. He whizzed in circles and headed back down while I rested, for the hill had been a tough one. As you weaken with dependence on the machine, I muttered to myself, I grow stronger. There is one certainty in the cycling world: trad bikers will outlive the e-bikers, who are fools to give up the physical benefits, the spiritual joys, the liberty and independence of the human-powered mechanism.

Our machine dependence, of course, is growing at an exponential rate, as AI comes into wide usage. If the internet, per author Nicholas Carr, has made us stupid, AI promises to make us even stupider. Carr has argued, correctly, that with its endless distractions and fragmented structure, its flashing rabbit-holes, its emphasis on speed and constant switching (between subjects, links, pages, images, etc.), the internet causes cognitive damage, a rewiring of the brain so that we’re less able to ponder and meditate, to think at length and complexly — to go deep. His 2010 book “The Shallows” remains the most important inquiry into technological immanence and its consequences since Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” in 1992.

Now comes AI, and we face a new disaster for human cognition, as the prospect of artificial intelligence-induced imbecility is confirmed in study after study of the use of large-language models such as ChatGPT.

One researcher looked into the “future of critical thinking” in an LLM-saturated environment and found “significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” The breakdown of critical thinking was due to the obvious factor of the increase in “cognitive offloading” that apps like ChatGPT afford. Instead of staying fit doing hard work, the brain “muscle” atrophies as it allows the machine to carry the load. There were echoes of Carr in the conclusion to the study, which noted that AI dependency can “diminish users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking processes.” Younger people were found to be particularly vulnerable, exhibiting “lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” Kids, teens and young adults, in other words, are the most endangered by the technology. (Think about that, you adults who are making money off peddling and proselytizing tech — you are hurting children.)

A team from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University published similar findings in February. Use of “generative AI,” i.e. large language models, can “inhibit critical engagement with work,” diminish skill-sets “for independent problem-solving” and — this should be so obvious it need not be said — lead to “long-term overreliance on the tool.” In this telling, AI is a brain-rotting narcotic; the heavier the use, the greater the addiction, the more damage done.

Finally, there’s the MIT study published in June, titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” Tasked with writing an essay, study participants were broken into three groups: brain-only, those who completed the essay without machine aid; search-engine users, who were allowed access to Google or the like to supplement the writing; and large-language model users, who were free to have ChatGPT do the heavy lifting. During the writing of the essays, the researchers measured “brain connectivity” with electroencephalography. Their conclusion: “Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity.”

Cognitive activity dropped with each increment of increased use of the machine. To reiterate: The more dependent on tech for crafting your thoughts, the lower your mental performance, the stupider you get. And the stupidifying endures over time. “Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance.”

Between February and April, the number of ChatGPT users worldwide increased from 400 million to 800 million (and this from 50 million in January 2023). In the U.K., the proportion of students who did not use ChatGPT or other LLMs collapsed from 47% last year to 12% this year — only a tenth of students surveyed were holding out against the machine. By the middle of 2024, almost 90% of students at Harvard were employing LLMs for their studies. More than 70% of American adults report regularly using AI, and a third say they use it every day.

Our cognitive disaster is unfolding as if it’s the way of the world, like sun-up over the horizon and the light that blankets the land — inevitable, irreversible, the nature of things. This may be so, given that bowing before the tech god is inherent in industrial civilization, an expression of the fanatical worship of innovation that goes unquestioned in our society.

Meanwhile, I am reminded that the rider of the e-bike who passes us by with his artificial speed is day by day turning into a flabby mess. The few who retain their strength and their independence, who refuse to bend the knee to the machine, will only grow more powerful, more intelligent — perhaps to win a Darwinian race in the long run, when the feeble-minded and servile dependents on AI will be eliminated after the machine system fails.

(This article originally appeared in the Sept. 21, 2025 edition of the LA Times.)

I should say here that I’m not a Christian, nor a believer in any faith. Religious instruction for me began and ended at age 7 when my father, an environmental engineer and clean air activist, explained that there is no God, no afterlife, no spirit, and the only revelation is nothingness upon death. But I am a believer in the wisdom teachings of Jesus Christ, who preached that the path to the good life was through love and compassion for your fellow human beings, humility and reciprocity, and release from the temptations of wealth.

Let’s take the case of Charlie Kirk, latest martyr of American Christendom, as exemplary of how the evangelical cult makes a mockery of the tenets of Jesus of Nazareth.

In contrast with Jesus, Kirk was a force of squalid malevolence who got rich and famous shouting lies, wallowing in ignorance, fomenting chaos and violence, spreading foul rumors and falsehoods, serving at times as “a blatant government disinformation agent” – serving Caesar over the spirit of truth – and mocking and vilifying the weak, the needy, the poverty-stricken. His MO as a professional online bloviator was the delivery of cheap social media slam-dunks elevated somehow to substantive political contribution – and always on bended knee to fellate corrupt emperor Trumpus.

Kirk preached the prosperity gospel, the love of money gospel, the worship of power gospel – not the gospel one reads in the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Jesus hung out with prostitutes and lepers, the blind and the mute, the poor, sick, diseased, alien and outcast. He spent his time tending to these wretches of society, doctor to the needy. Kirk spent his time bullying people and calling for harm, attacking those who did not fit his vision of a proper society of respectable wealth and class and race. He was foremost a Christian nationalist and, in his proselytizing of the so-called prosperity gospel, driven by the “greed for filthy lucre” condemned in the Books of Timothy and Titus.

One imagines Kirk as the wealthy young man in Matthew 19 who approached Jesus during his ministry in Perea by River Jordan. The young man, endowed with immense riches, wanted to get to heaven without leaving his money behind. Jesus said it was impossible. Give everything to the poor, Jesus told the young man, who was so disheartened at having to abandon his glittery junk that “he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.”

Once this creature was out of hearing, Jesus turned to his followers: “Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.” And not content with having made his point, he brought it home: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

So much for the claim of a doctrinal origin of the prosperity gospel. From rightwing cable news and podcasts of influence one rarely (never?) hears that Jesus despised the rich. In the blinkered worldview of evangelical capitalistic Christianity, one hears people like Kirk on record screeching of their love of wealth-seeking.

Jesus didn’t like businessmen, and he had no patience for commerce in holy places. The Book of Matthew describes how he came with his followers into Jerusalem and went to the temple to pray. Instead of rabbis, he found in the temple moneychangers and merchants. Crazed at the sight, fashioning a whip out of rope, Jesus “began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; And would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

By other accounts, Jesus inveighed against the temple degenerating into “a market.”

It sounded like Jesus wanted revolutionary trouble, for which he got the usual response from authorities: “And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they might destroy him: for they feared him…”

I suspect that Charlie Kirk, inveterate servant of power and money, hustler in the den of thieves, would have been first among those to charge Jesus with terrorism for his disruption of business-as-usual in the temple.

I’m not alone in my assessment of Kirk’s legacy. “When right-wing commentators like Charlie Kirk drape Christianity in the garb of American capitalism,” opined a writer at Good Faith Media, “they betray the very essence of the faith.” The writer continued:

Kirk’s brand of Christianity defended unfettered markets, glorified inequality, and baptized violence, particularly through his defense of unrestricted gun ownership and his denigration of marginalized communities.

Capitalism in its American form is no less exploitative than Rome’s imperial economy. Like Caesar’s grain monopolies, American capitalism consolidates wealth in the hands of a few while extracting labor and resources from the many. It sanctifies greed, normalizes economic disparity, and sacrifices the vulnerable at the altar of profit. To claim that such a system reflects the will of God is not Christianity; it is idolatry.

The gospel does not sanctify empire; it exposes it. The cross is not a symbol of imperial victory but of imperial violence unmasked and overcome by divine solidarity with the oppressed. The resurrection is not a metaphor for private hope but a declaration that the powers of death—whether Rome’s legions or modern capitalism’s machinery—do not have the final word.

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Arnold Toynbee, one of the great 20^th century historians, wrote that the wisdom teachers of the ages – he singled out three in particular: the Buddha in India, Lao Tse in China, and Jesus in Palestine – “all agreed that the pursuit of material wealth is a wrong aim. We should aim only at the minimum wealth needed to maintain life; and our main aim should be spiritual. They all said with one voice, that if we made material wealth our paramount aim, this would lead to disaster. They all spoke in favor of unselfishness and of love for other people as the key to happiness and to success in human affairs.”

The New York Times reports that evangelical Christians, who have made the monkey in the White House their secular vehicle for God, are now exploiting Kirk’s assassination to gain converts. “There’s no option for Christians to just sit on the sidelines anymore,” a proselyte told the paper. “The sideline’s gone. The world needs Jesus, and it’s up to us to tell them about him.”

The world does need Jesus – the actual Jesus, not the one these liars have appropriated. If there were a God, he might help us. At this point, all we have are the wisdom teachings of old to fight against false prophets.