Excerpts

The past two months, and now the President's speech, and all I can think is that the environmental movement is a catastrophic fucking failure. The worst. Probably made things worse by compromising with the worst people in the world, with those Al Gore envirocapitalists who milked more world-destroying dollars out of the movement, with reactionary imperialists who jerk off thinking about how close to nature the heathens are, with the Recyclers whose environmentalism is only assuaging their (deserved) guilt and allowing them to use more resources, you know what, fuck that, even calling it the use of resources is a compromise too far, allowing them to destroy more and more completely so they can make their stupid meaningless lives even more shit and vapid and self-satisfied. With even the good-hearted people who go to Gulf coasts to meaningless wash a few surviving birds and perpetuate the lie that this shit can ever be cleaned up, that we can control the messes we make, or that the messes aren't the consequence of the lifestyles that allow them the time to volunteer.

It's failed, it will have failed. How important was it? Is the recycler just a microcosm, were we just the engine for our culture to feel better, some tiny penance they felt they had to pay? Even worse, we weren't penance but mere confession, a saying out loud how horrible they are so that they can imagine they're no longer horrible. It feels this meaningless to me.

The compromises kill me, they really do. We believed, I indict you here as well, that somehow capitalist production could grow fast enough to provide us with options, but it couldn't and we ignored how they would accumulate that research capital in the first place; by destroying the fucking earth. We were so far beaten that we let them convince us that this was our best shot, which it wasn't, just all the options were completely awful.

(As a quick caveat, I'm not saying that environmentalism needs to be a centralized state system to work, obviously that's not true, but that any environmentalism needs to be resolutely anti-capitalist.)

But this is still just stupid fantasizing. There isn't any environmentalism at all, it doesn't need to be anything because it just isn't.

What is to be done, indeed. Despair is the only plausible outlet we seem to have, but it's more disgusting, because it causes us to frantically search for options. Resignation done right, maybe, not by compromising, but withdrawing completely, running away from the world, but it's not one that satisfies. Satisfaction isn't really the point anymore, is it, though. I feel well and truly lost, and happy for it. At least I can't pretend this might be fixed or that some super-majority of this or that political party will do a fucking thing about it or that the damage wasn't already done.

I hope this doesn't become just a hardening where I lose the ability to engage, if an engagement becomes possible in the future. It could be that environmentalism is what it says it is, even the pathetically degraded version that exists, that it's "making people aware" who will one day, against all historical evidence, do the right thing and not accept their fucking comfort at the cost of millions of dead bodies. Maybe environmentalism with even stop its secret fantasy, that of the insignificant moral compass that a toxic future can look back on and say "See, somebody fucking got it, now we can judge those pieces of shit and justify the new horrible things we've designed..."

I just don't know what to do but give up.