96. End:CIV How Our Industrial Society Is Leading Towards An Ecological Apocalypse

18 important takeaways from this documentary: 

00:01:32 It’s not an exaggeration to say that right now we are living in an ecologicial apocalypse. Between the years 1980 and 2045 we will lose more species of plants and animals than have been lost in the last 65 million years.

For the most part we’re oblivious to it; e don’t want to know about it, and we don’t want to hear about it.

00:05:20  Derrek Jensen, author of the 2-volume set End Game, argues that there is an urgent need to bring down civilization and lays out his case against civilization through 20 premises. Here are four of them:

Premise I:


00:06:10 Civilization is a way of life characterized by the growth of cities – large groups of people living in a density of population that the local land base cannot support them. This means that the city must get its resources from somewhere else because you’ve denuded all the resources where you live. So you go out to other areas of the world, take what you need, and ship those resources back into the city.

Unfortunately, this industrial culture won’t stop until it has consumed as much resouces as it can, or until we stop consuming them ourselves.

00:08:26 If your entire civilization is based on any one resource: oil, for example, you would think about what’s going to happen when the oil runs out.

00:08:40 Today’s humans have found energy resources which allow us to escape the kinds of limits that previous cultures have had to face much more quickly.

00:09:00 With horses, humans were relatively confined to how far they could to in collecting resources. With modern jets and vehicular transportation, there are no longer any limitations – neither in distance nor in quantity of transport.

00:10:20 Civilizations are very often cutting their own throats very visibly yet just keep on doing it.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For one example of this, watch the news report How Your Technology Waste Destroys The Planet & Compromises Your Security.]

Premise II:



00:28:07 One of the reasons we don’t see the violence is because it is exported to other part of the world. Another reason we don’t see  the violence is because we have been so metabolized into the system that we have bought into this strange notion that it is okay to have to pay to exist on the planet. and if you don’t pay, then law enforcement comes and bad things happen to you.

00:29:00 We are being told by most of the environmental movement is that the way to stop the oncoming ecologicial apocalypse is  through personal consumer choices. – Lierre Keith, Author of The Vegetarian Myth


“By purchasing our product the consumer can make a small easy step to a greener earth and help save millions of trees.”

00:29:55 The history of the environmental movement will tell us a little about why it isn’t working. In the 1970′s there was a lot of radical protesting happening – the real hay-day for environmentalism. Simultaneously, corporations began realizing that they could sell a lot of things by calling them ‘green.’


[EDITOR’S NOTE: Advertising agencies are often placed in the uncomfortable position of being asked to brand a company or product as ‘green.’ For more on this read my interview with Olivier Hubinois, Advertising Account Manager.]

00:31:00 A major problem with the environmental solutions put forth by people is that they confuse what is real with what is not real – taking the industrial economy as a given and figuring out how can we save the industrial economy while also saving our planet. Even the idea of managing the earth’s resources more wisely still fundamentally presumes that the industrial economy as a given.

It doesn’t matter if I buy environmentally-friendly hemp soap if there’s a runaway greenhouse effect and the planet becomes uninhabitable. Future generations won’t care about how ‘hard’ we tried: whether we recycled or wrote to our local legislature; what they will care about is do they live on a living planet where they can drink the water and breath the air.

Premise IV:


00:43:29 We’ve built a society based on cheap and easily accessible resources. As the easily accessible oil is being depleted, we are moving on to more expensive and difficult to reach oil reserves, such as bitumen. Our world, which relies almost totally on oil, is nearing its end.

00:52:00 Social change doesn’t happen by moral suasion; it happens through force. The problem with persuasion strategy is that it only works on people who can actually be convinced and be relied upon to act from their position after their minds have been changed.

But we are not dealing with individuals who can be convinced or persuaded, we’re dealing mostly with large, abstract social organizations and corporations made out of huge numbers of people.

The remaining 16 Premises:











XV: Love does not imply pacifism.








Image from the articleTHE 9 LIMITS OF OUR PLANET … AND HOW WE’VE RACED PAST 4 OF THEM by John Carey.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For more information about how global warming is putting your company’s security at risk, watch the video: How Technology Waste Destroys The Planet & Compromises Your Security.]