More Alien Occupation

About my proposal in my last post that we refigure unsustainable practices "less as matters of ill-considered exploitation and more as matters of ongoing foreign occupation" a reader comments in the Moot:

The downside though is that people who realize how much they depend on their oil will shrug and end up being in favor of foreign occupation in general. People are really attached to their lifestyles.

But of course I am not making the point (though it is also quite true, obviously) that what have come to pass for "civilized" lifeways depend on the devastation, usually facilitated by militaries, of overexploited regions of the world -- a point exacerbated, possibly beyond healing, by resource descent (peak oil, topsoil loss, air pollution, peak coal, species die-off, freshwater depletion/salination/toxification, antibiotics resistance, and so on).

It is a larger earth-alienation that I have in mind when I speak of extractive-petrochemical industrial model technodevelopment as a kind of foreign occupation. My point is a variation on the Arendtian warning that we earthlings court catastrophe if we begin acting instead as if we were "dwellers in the universe."

To the extent that "geo-engineering" discourse represents the consummation of military-industrial ideology -- the moment of the perfect false identification of the ongoing destruction of the living world as instead the way to preserve the living world -- I hope it becomes a little clearer why I have emphasized in my many critiques of "geo-engineering" the earth alienated vantage assumed by its "futurological" advocates, the re-imagination of themselves as aliens arriving on an alien planet, the re-imagination of environmentalism as the "techno-terraforming" of a Terra terrorized in fact by extractive-industrial technoscience.

Although, as you say, people declare themselves stubbornly attached to their wasteful lifestyles it has been remarkable for me to discover just how bendable how many people seem to be to the will of completely arbitrary and palpably unjust austerity measures demanded by corporate-militarist oligarchs eager to pile their pointless treasure ever higher at the people's utterly immiserating expense, for example. In other words, I call bullshit on the claim that people really can't be moved from their wasteful suicidal pointless and usually in any case miserable lifestyles -- I think they appear to be effortlessly moved without pretext or a peep of protest indeed. But come what may, even if stupid assholes declare themselves unwilling to change their ways we have reached the point when continued waste and destruction will detach them from their lives themselves, without which they cannot continue in their idiotic lifestyles in any fashion in any case, however attached they fancy themselves to be to them. If that is what we have come to (and I think it is not), then I am glad to see the whole lot of us go, and expect we soon shall.