The War on the Ecosystem is Lost. Should we Surrender?

A post for the anniversary of the execution of Sophie Scholl by the German Nazis in 1943.

Sophie Scholl (b.1921) was a German student and a member of the “White Rose” association, a group of young people who tried to oppose the Nazi government and stop the war. She was accused of high treason, found guilty, and beheaded on Feb 22, 1943. There are some eerie similarities between the situation in Germany during WW2 and our situation, where we are engaged in a war against Earth’s ecosystem. We haven’t arrived (yet) to execute those who criticize the idea that the war must continue, but we are clearly moving toward a condition in which opposition to the government will not be tolerated. The case of Julian Assange is a good indication of the trend. We refuse to admit that we are fighting a battle we know we can’t win. (*)

At the beginning of WW2, the Axis troops advanced everywhere, one victory after another. By the end of 1941, total victory seemed to be at hand, with the Soviet Union close to surrendering. The Germans were so sure of themselves that they developed the “Ostplan” to manage the conquered Russia. According to the plan, most Russians were to be killed or expelled, and the surviving ones turned into servants of the herrenvolk, the master race; the Germans themselves.

But that was not to happen. In 1942, the Axis offensive in the East stalled, and by 1943, with the defeat of Stalingrad, it was clear that the attack on the Soviet Union had failed. It was only a question of time before Germany would be forced to choose between surrendering or annihilation. The German leaders must have known that, but their reaction was a classic example of “pulling the levers in the wrong direction.” They always tried to counter the defeats by stepping up their military effort. It was self-defeating because Germany’s enemies had more resources, a larger population, and a larger industrial base.

During the last phases of the war, the German efforts became frantic. In addition to enlisting every person who could fight, a desperate measure was the development of the Vergeltungswaffen, revenge weapons, or Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons. Mostly, these weapons were unmanned flying bombs, more a propaganda tool than an effective weapon. In fact, the Germans were lucky that their wonder weapons didn’t work so well because, if they had, the Allies were ready to retaliate by using poison gases against German cities (**). The German government also rounded up and killed everyone who was judged not useful for the war effort: the untenmenschen, Jews, Gypsies, and other groups, including ethnic Germans. Among the many mad ideas of this period, one was to encourage German senior citizens to commit suicide to save food for combatants. The German government seemed to intend to beat the Allies by having them kill so many Germans that they would get tired of doing that.

How could such a blindness develop? It was because of the structure of those gigantic creatures called “states.” Sometimes, we speak about “totalitarian states,” but all states are totalitarian to a certain degree. The state’s political and legal structures are designed to keep the system stable, not to allow it to change, including the weird ritual called “democracy.” The Germany of the 1940s was just more totalitarian than most; with the government completely controlling the media, including TV (Germany had public TV from 1935).

The result was that the Germans found themselves locked in a no-exit situation. You may call it “perception polarization” in psychology, “Nash Equilibrium” in game theory, and “Zugzwang” in chess. It is the same concept: if you move, you lose. Imagine that you are in a movie theater, and you smell smoke. Are you going to scream “fire”? If you do, and there is no fire, you will be branded as a doom-monger. But if nobody screams, everybody gets roasted.

It is what happened in Germany in the 1940s. Sophie Scholl and her friends tried to scream, “We are losing the war,” but they had no hope of contrasting the state media with home-printed leaflets. Sophie and two other members of the “White Rose” group were solemnly beheaded on 22 February 1943, without anyone daring to speak in their favor. Another attempt to depose Hitler failed in 1944. The path to disaster remained open, and Germany followed it to the bitter end.

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Now, fast-forward to our times, and let’s see what similarities we can find between our current situation and the Germany of WW2. States are like people; they are all different, but it is also true that they tend to react in the same way in similar situations. So, even though it would be far off to say that our governments are staffed with Nazis (or maybe, in some cases, yes), similarities can tell us something useful for what we may expect in the future.

We could see humankind's relationship with Earth’s ecosystem as a war that has been ongoing for centuries and that, so far, has seen humans victorious on all fronts. Entire species have been exterminated, lands deforested, the sea emptied, mineral resources plundered, and humans are nowadays the most numerous mammal species of comparable size.

But, just like the tide turned against the German armies in 1943, nowadays we are seeing the Ecosystem fighting back using powerful weapons: a blitzkrieg of floods, droughts, hurricanes, warming, poisoning, viruses, and more, destroying the very foundations of the human war machine. Humans are still fighting, but there is no doubt about who will win in the long run.

Facing this kind of situation, there are remarkable similarities with what Germany did during WW2. Let’s see a few of them.

1. Doing more of the same. Germany stepped up the military effort, while we are stepping up the effort to exploit natural resources. We are working on extracting more oil from the ground, using more mineral resources, deforesting more land (called “bioenergy”), fishing down the trophic chain, and more.

2. Tight control of the media. We haven’t yet arrived at a complete state control of the media, but we are rapidly moving in that direction. Everything against the official truth is termed “fake news” and erased or made invisible.

3. Clamping down on opponents. We are not beheading dissenters (yet), as the Germans did with Sophie Scholl. But the case of Julian Assange is an ominous symptom that we are going in that direction.

4. Betting on miraculous technologies. The equivalents of the old Vergeltungswaffen are hydrogen, nuclear fusion, bioenergy, and other assorted pretended miracles.

5. Neglecting consequences. More effective German Wunderwaffen could have caused Germany to be attacked with poison gas. In our case, effective geoengineering technologies to stop global warming could backfire and change Earth’s climate in unpredictable ways.

6. Eliminating the untenmenschen — now called “human animals.”

7. Eliminating senior citizens. This is not official (it wasn’t official during WWII in Germany, either), and there is no proof that it has been engineered by governments. But it is happening anyway for various reasons: pollution, heat waves, a poorer diet, and the collapse of the public health care system.

Eighty-one years ago, Sophie Scholl bravely tried to change the trajectory of the Behemoth that was the German state, without success. Efforts by individuals or small groups also have no chance against the much larger Behemoth that’s the modern global system. But the war will end, one day or another. It won’t be easy, nor painless, but eventually, we’ll have to surrender to the Ecosystem and find a way to live in peace with it. After all, we are part of it.

Notes

(*) This post was inspired by an editorial recently appearing in a major Italian newspaper titled, “It is time to stop worrying about the environment; we need to direct all our efforts to restart economic growth.”

(**) “Hitler’s Terror Weapons: The Price of Vengeance” Roy Irons, 2013