Environmental Sociology

Portland State University

11-8-10

Instructor: Veronica Dujon

Pupil: Mary Eng

When some of the logging companies and sawmills decided not to use timber purchased

from the US Forest Service (USFS) in confirmation of the activists efforts, the complexity of the

situation must be elucidated. While it could causally be located in the publicity stunt value of the

environmental activists’ destruction of the logging trucks, the larger symbolic value of this type

of act must be assigned to the greater eternal, priceless value of the forests, or the “eternal” value

of publicity, especially now in the internet era of total infinitude of replication, through echo

chambers of digital petroglyphic duplication.

In a typical materialist analysis of affairs a simple success/failure binary might be assigned to

the totality of events. But with the passage of time we are privileged with the scope of history

which alters our perception of success. One way to assess the value of the chain of events would

be to calculate the carbon footprint involved in the production of the machinery which was

destroyed. In this manner, the affair of the so-called environmental activists has a very heavy

carbon footprint. At the time of their action, it might not have been trendy to measure human

activities in such a way, but now through the lens of history, it might be helpful to quantify

this in favor of a material analysis of what has transpired. The human toil involved in mining

could be quantified, such that the machinery’s destruction had an irrevocable, though perhaps

negligible value in terms of human toil. In this way the struggle for the environment must also

intermesh with human “rights” in any postulation of environmental progress.

 Another aspect to the equation is the true pricelessness of the life-giving oxygen for the future

of human kind. Conceivably, in one thousand years, true human benefit will occur with the

flourishing of the forests. Countless lives will be bettered by trees. Materially and chemically

and biologically, the humans of the future will prosper immensely in the richness of the trees.

In the pricelessness of the trees, any sacrifice might be justified towards a publicity which

holds promise for the trees’ preservation and the universalization of earth-consciousness. But

to what extent might the logic of this rationale towards property destruction involve true human

costs? Would killing humans for the sake of the environment, be permissable, if it holds great

benefit for the future of the trees? This might sound absurd, but holds a certain arguability. As

the destruction of human life for an overall human good, embodies a pure utilitarian evaluation

of quantity of human life, would it be applicable to numerically evaluate the loss of life for the

good of future life?

Or from an opposite angle, would it pertain to the immediacy of the process of earth-

destruction, to put the human misery to a final end, faster, in a sort of “final solution” of

global scale? In regards to what is ecocide, to accelerate the process, perhaps justifiable as a

minimization of human misery, in a Hippocratic sense. As human bodies absorb the toxicities

of the river systems, the air pollution, etc. they are morphologically altering the course of their

projected range of possibility. As sponges of pollution, with the forests increasingly destroyed,

would it be better, to entirely annihilate the material chemical benefit of the life-giving, air-

filtering trees, along a logic of efficient ecocide? By accelerating the evolutional deterioration

of the human species towards a path of total genocidal ecocidal toxicity, collectively, there

could be a moral logic towards the immediacy of species self-extinction. And in the sense that
we could perpetuate the narcotizations of blissful first-world extravagancies of technologically

enhanced fossil-fuel powered luxury, the narcotizing power of entertaining ourselves to death,

with maximum velocity, could be considered moral, in a backdoor sort of way, contingent on

a politics of racist exploitation of resources so effusively demonstrated by corporations such s

Chevron, whose pernicious petrol policy in Nigeria made demonization of ecological desires for

clean water, an eco-terroristic affair.

As perhaps, all affairs of the modern age exist in moral vacuums, wherein various value

systems pertain to various peoples, or classes, the future minded humans, who sense moral

obligation to posterity, could be considered delusional, for humans geared towards total ecocide

and genocidal activities.

Another aspect to consider is the timeliness of any ethical quandary. We might assign

this activity of property destruction and the accompanying publicity coup, a very high value,

in a value system generated by 1980’s cultural values. But perhaps in the futurity of total

information awareness as the darpa-->internet has morphed into being where new media and

total transparency trump actual activity of any kind. In a sense a Wikileaks of ecocide might

prevail, a total hacking of corporate databases, or a legal discovery process though processing

of ecologically minded lawsuits through court systems prejudiced to protect the mechanisms

of industries which give them life----such that digital revolutions dethrone material paper court

reporting, and the documentation of corporate economic and moral currencies.

The sentencing of the activists to 20 years in prison could be viewed in a sacrificial way. Any

individual who decided to embark on such a obvious risk to their autonomy, must in some way

come to terms with the consequences of prison years isolated from other activisms. Some might

elect a journalistic approach, some a militant approach, some might plant trees, or some might
gain law degrees, or succumb to the corporatization of eco-publicity (greenwash, green industry/

green capitalism, soft-green for-profit non-profitism: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, etc.). The affairs

of such activities known increasingly as “eco-terrrorism” must be assessed in terms of their

negative consequences. Will the damage to the collective consciousness matter? And as we

and our earth are pushed towards extinctions and morphological bioaccumulated toxicity which

alters our neurochemical processing, such that we are involuntarily smog-filled, petrochemical-

absorbent, coal-breathing, pesticide filled cyborgs . . . at which point how can we assess the

success of any of this?????

Also worthy of noteworthy are perceptual elements of peer pressure as they affect members

of any group, as they affect both the consuming and the eco-evangelical groups. Who exactly is

being coerced? The mere actors of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) or the entire corporatocracy?

And to whom will it matter post-ecocide?