What does the environment have to do with any of this?

 Everything. The idealized vision of the environment is already dead, replaced with a patchwork of undoable scars and competing invasive species, and even that is in the final stages of life. Moving forward the term will be primarily used to refer to general local flora and fauna, as “the environment” in those terms can be applied to any situation which isn’t urban- festering pigeon and rat infestations do not count as wildlife, they too are components of the system, functionally citizens without representation laboring to ensure our industrialized pest control system doesn’t fail and bring the rest of us down with it. Even the “radical alarmist” positions derided by state media and actors claim that we can still turn this around which is simply no longer true. The great reef has been bleached five timesand the rainforest is being burnt down for cattle farms. The hippies lost.

If you want to know why we continue the battle despite having lost the war, read Blessed is the Flame. I prefer the world dying in peace over allowing the corporations to spitroast it from both ends right up to and after the flatline. They continue to drain Mother Earth’s cold, milky tits at the same rate with no plans to slow down for even a second. The petrol-economy is one of the most critical industries of neoliberalism and only the most easily controlled opposition is allowed any air-time, hence the continued inadequacy and dickless fearmongering of the american Green Party, who spend more time rabble-rousing about how nuclear power is Morally Bad than they do figuring out a way to mine cobalt without burying children alive.

Make no mistake, I harbor no positive sentiment towards children and will be elaborating on post-natalism later, nor do I myself pass a moral judgement on hypocrisy itself, but I say too that you cannot have an expectation that I take them seriously despite it. Green power is itself industrialized and detrimental to the environment despite all of the money that they have spent on advertising to claim otherwise. The very production of solar panels off-gasses sulfur hexafluoride- the deadliest greenhouse gas- in vast quantities. Both solar and wind suffer from unpredictability, being hamstrung by cloudy or non-windy days, leading to a chronic reliance on the usage of batteries to supplement them for the vast majority of time. About a fifth of each lithium ion battery is composed of cobalt, which as mentioned before has chronic child labor issues, but is also itself hugely detrimental to the environment and atmosphere. Solar concentration also creates incredible hot spots throughout the air that birds are unable to see, having the dramatic effect of lighting them on fire mid-air, leading to there being about a dozen burnt birds in the local animal rescue at any given time ever since the installation of a solar farm. Wind is enough of a joke that it doesn’t deserve any further consideration.

Despite this, they tell us that the real threat is nuclear waste, the high-level variant of which lasts for 5 to 15 years at most, and is still safe enough that a barrel of it could sit in your room for a year with no ill effect. The total production of nuclear waste by its chief producer- the United States- would fill one football field to a depth of less than ten yards, and yet, we hollowed out an entire mountain simply for its containment- an effort which was itself derided and replaced with the tactic of simply forcing our nuclear plants to keep their spent nuclear waste on site in the aforementioned barrels, which has worked fine due to the inherent safety of nuclear power plants. There was one meltdown in Chernobyl that killed 31 people and suddenly nuclear programs across the world found themselves kneecapped in infancy- how many die of lung cancer every year due to greenhouse gases? One urban industrial center kills more people every single year than all nuclear means combined throughout history, atomic weapons included.

To make an easy example on a topic with which I am intimately familiar, let’s look at water: it needs to be consumed by every single person on a constant basis. How do you make sure to indefinitely support 4 million water drinkers in a space that previously was occupied by tumbleweeds and sagebrush? Enter: the California Water Wars.

 The only way to support the growing population of Los Angeles was through a brutal campaign of chicanery, subterfuge, and lies, through which they obtained vast and extensive water rights, to the point where you can leave the city and drive north for six hours without leaving LADWP land. They drained so many lakes that a windy day would kick arsenic into the air in such quantities that the sky turned red, leading to apocalyptic “Red Days” or similar alkaloid “Keeler Fogs”.

“It’s in a class by itself,” said Duane Ono, the EPA specialist on Owens Lake dust. “There’s nowhere in the country that measures higher concentrations, except during some forest fires.”

Except that we too are a center for forest fires!

The same mechanism that drove LADWP to murder one in six people in the central valley by way of lung cancer is what puts PG&E in the mountain murdering 90 people by way of “Camp Fire” (calculated decision to save money on maintenance), if an industry exists then the state will get its cut by any means necessary. People will acquire their needs by any means necessary, and we have monetized that fact, meaning that similar stories have played out for every resource required at all 10,000 cities which exist at present, all of the uncountable multitudes that have existed since the agricultural revolution, and thanks to the Silurian Hypothesis we have no way of even knowing that we are only industrial civilization within history.

Thankfully Mother Earth is abundant, and can still support us even in so extravagant an expansion, and yet, the dogmatic pursuit of resource accumulation ensures we are given the absolute least possible- it keeps us within a razor’s edge of starvation even as our impulse to survive ensures we infringe enough to get enough of what is left to survive, while the bourgeoisie laugh and pretend the system is “self-managing” rather than calling it what it is, the industrialization of economic violence.