The Foundations of Decay
An Update from Maren and Jake
Update and Moving Forward
We wanted to apologize for the delay on producing more Substack pieces and give a little update. Time has flown by incomprehensibly fast, and when you’re working on a film/podcast/writing project, it seems impossible to keep up with creating valuable content. Now that we have a bit of a break where we’ll be editing and creating rather than traveling and filming, we hope to be a lot more regular with our posts. We just got back from filming on the East Coast for 3 weeks, which had immediately followed a 2-week long trek through California, which was in large part an exploration of the incredibly fragile water system (and social system) that feeds the US 80% of its produce.
Currently I (Maren) am working on a piece that aims to make sense of our modern food system: how did it begin? What technological inventions brought about the rapid increase in food production, which caused our population to quadruple in 100 years? What are the ecological and geopolitical consequences of such inventions? Are we stuck— ensnared in a food system that is irreparably complicated, or is there somewhere can we go from here to create a resilient, just system? Or are we traveling further and further down a road which will only lead to more consolidation and control by Big Agribusiness and its WEF funders?
I have several other pieces planned, some covering the lack of democracy in our society, trauma and how it impacts our ability to show up in the world, and an analysis of the Book of Genesis.
We also wanted to announce a new arrangement for this Substack: while I’ll still work to create pieces of writing that tie into the film and podcast, we wanted to open up this space to be more collaborative. Moving forward, instead of hearing only from me and Jake, you’ll also be hearing from guest writers who are friends of us and the project. We hope this will bring some diversity of perspective and help us all complexify our understanding of the world, while co-creating new visions together.
In the meantime, here are some books, videos, current events, and music to check out.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
“Part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.”
A stunningly brilliant depiction of the madness of genius, and the earth-changing, life-altering decisions many have made through their curiosity and vision to solve problems— some with devastating outcomes. This book is part fiction, part non-fiction, written with incredible eloquence and evocation. It centers on a handful of scientists who changed the world in the early 20th century: Fritz Haber, Karl Schwarzchild, Alexander Grothendieck, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, and Albert Einstein, weaving together their stories and the modern consequences of their visions.
This book impels the reader to ask the question, what happens when a scientist releases the genie from its bottle and alters the trajectory of history? As Grothendieck wrote (in this fictional rendering), riddled with madness and guilt over the damage his profession, mathematics, had done, “The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicists armed with a fistful of equations.” Can we regain our ability understand the world without reducing it down to catastrophic extents?
Can errors be avoided if we accept our limitations and embrace the humility that comes from complexity?
“A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape. Only when complementary views of the same reality combine are we capable of achieving fuller access to the knowledge of things. The more complex the object we are attempting to apprehend, the more important it is to have different sets of eyes, so that these rays of light converge and we can see the One through the many. That is the nature of true vision: it brings together already known points of view and shows others hitherto unknown, allowing us to understand that all are, in actuality, part of the same thing.”
Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò
This book is a fabulous critique on the elite and corporate capture of social justice issues, and puts into focus the need to create new systems rather than retrofitting the old, corrupted, and irrevocably unjust systems to be more inclusive. Táíwò lays out how the system, as it currently stands, is designed to be predatory to the poor, the working class, and the Global South. Táíwò compassionately critiques and analyzes “deference politics” as means of centering the most marginalized, which tends to mold representation into spaces (or “rooms”) where certain marginalized people already have access. This happens concurrently with ignoring all that happens outside of these rooms of privilege, such as academia, government, or social/legacy media. He writes:
“Acting on this conception of ‘centering the most marginalized’ would require a different approach entirely, in a world where 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing (slum conditions) and 100 million are unhoused, a full third of the human population does not have reliable drinking water, and the intersections of food, energy, and water insecurity with the climate crisis have already displaced 8.5 million people in South Asia alone, while threatening to displace tens of a millions more. Such a stance would require, at a minimum, that one leave the room.”
It’s like the famous Chico Mendes quote goes: "Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening." Only in embracing the entirety of the complexity of the story we live in will we make real progress towards a better world. Only in attending to that complexity in our striving to find solutions to our problems will we create lasting, resilient change. Our societal problems are inextricably intertwined. To achieve resilience in all facets of society will require the the wholesale restructuring of all systems. While this may seem like a gargantuan task, and it is, it’s the task of our lifetimes. So long as we’re judicious in noticing elite/corporate capture of “solutions,” we may have a chance to create a truly democratic society. To paraphrase Táíwò’s quote below, we don’t need to invite people to the existing table which was built on colonialism, genocide, slavery, and exploitation— we need a new fucking table.
“We need to focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not on regulating the traffic within and between them. This is a world-making project aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, not mere critique of the ones we already have.”
The (R)Evolution of Indigenous Foods
Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation, explains how the history of colonization and homogenization has separated the Americas and its people from its ancestral food culture. He discusses the loss of indigenous education, the near-extermination of the bison, and the systematic cultural and physical genocide that the US government inflicted upon indigenous people and how that has severed people from their traditional foodways. He talks about how diverse this continent is, not only in edible flora and fauna, but also in indigenous groups, language, and culture — and that we should celebrate this diversity and learn from it.
As our food system becomes increasingly systematized and the diversity of foods becomes more and more bland and standardized, we not only lose diversity in our food culture and contribute to biotic cleansing of native species through industrial agriculture, we also become less resilient as people, communities, and nations. Additionally, harvesting native foods is an invaluable source of connection to the land.
This is by no means unique to North America, either. In the Arctic, you can witness a similar homogenization— where it’s easier to get beef, chicken, and tomatoes than it is to get reindeer born and bred on that landscape. Whether it’s our tastes for predictability and familiarity in our food, or the convenience of an industrial food system, our ability to adapt to climate change and to create resiliency is going to be dependent on our ability to excise ourselves from the industrial system.
Nord Stream Pipeline Explosions
It remains to be seen who is responsible for this attack, although people online are pointing to the White House signaling the US Government would incite such an attack in our proxy war with Russia. According to this briefing in February, where President Biden announced sanctions on Nord Stream 2, he further indicates, “As I have made clear, we will not hesitate to take further steps if Russia continues to escalate.” Even with Germany ending support of Nord Stream 2 right after the invasion of Ukraine, the US hasn’t been a fan of this project since the Trump administration (including imposing sanctions on car imports to coerce Germany into cancelling the project), but it seems reasonable to ask, would they go this far to end it for good?
Many people don’t see the “motivation” for the US to make this move, but given the US position as the world’s second largest exporter of natural gas and the global cageyness around pointing fingers at America (minus a former Polish PM), it’s certainly not out of the question. Additionally, opponents of Nord Stream 2 have been saying for years that these pipelines reduce the need for Ukrainian pipelines to exist, which exposes Ukraine to further vulnerabilities from Russia, so there could be a logic to attacking the pipeline in an effort to bring an end to the war and illicit the necessity for peaceful relations between the two nations. Interestingly, a day before the Russia attacked Ukraine, the US reinstated sanctions against Nord Stream 2.
Currently, a Swedish task force has begun investigations, and meanwhile Russia requested a hearing with the UN, where they stated, “If we consider it in terms of sound logic rather than delusional fantasies that Russians are ready to do whatever to intimidate Europe, then the answer is no. There is no point for us to undermine the project which cost us huge investment and which would bring us considerable economic returns. By the way it were you, the West, who claimed that we profiteered from exporting energy resources while the prices spiked. Now the most important question – does the United States benefit from what happened to the Nord Stream? Of course it does. American LNG suppliers now can celebrate a manifold increase of LNG deliveries to Europe… The people of Europe will be left face-to-face with their problems. Across the ocean, nobody cares that a long, dark, and cold winter is looming for the European continent.”
Could this be a red herring? Of course, but given the public’s generalized outrage at Russia for inciting a war with Ukraine, it’s important for us to still consider all sides and not be so quick to blame Russia at the exclusion of what might make the most sense. While it’s important to note that Russia has already limited its gas exports to Germany in retaliation for sanctions, that still isn’t probable cause to suggest that Russia would sabotage their own state-run pipelines. Likewise, it’s wise to not immediately point the finger at the United States without further evidence, though there is undeniably some fishiness coming from the West. On the other hand, this could be a move by Russia to cut off Europe permanently from its energy resources as punishment for their involvement in the war. Hopefully this investigation will not be encumbered by biased geopolitical influence, so the public can get the truth about what transpired.
Regardless of who is responsible, the consequences are dire geopolitically as well as ecologically. The release of methane from the pipelines are likely the largest methane leak in history. Researchers at GHGSat have stated that the leak equates to the burning of “630,000 pounds (around 286,000kg) of coal every hour.”
This is an ongoing story that might have disastrous consequences. If the US indeed attacked both pipelines, this could be an adequate reason for Russia to strike back. The threat of nuclear retaliation is real. All in all, it’s a tenuous situation with dire consequences. Given Germany’s chronic dependence on Russian oil and natural gas, as exemplified in this video below, the war between Ukraine and Russia and this pipeline sabotage will have crippling affects to Germany’s economy, which could lead to serious social instabilities that aren’t limited to an energy crisis.
This harkens to Jake’s oft-stated question: “What is environmentalism in the face of geopolitics? For every step that environmentalism takes forward, geopolitics forces it two steps back.”
Fortress Conservation: the Tip of the Iceberg
If you haven’t yet, be sure to listen to our recent podcast with Dr. Aby Sène, where we discuss the agenda’s behind dispossessions in Africa for conservation:
Read her critique of Western conservation non-profits and their role in dispossessing people from lands deemed as “protected areas” here, and her article outline the propaganda used to keep us mired in an unjust, unscientific system of conservation here.
The Foundations of Decay
And finally, we’d love to share with you a new song by our longtime favorite band, My Chemical Romance:
Lyrics:
See the man who stands upon the hill
He dreams of all the battles won
But fate had left its scars upon his face
With all the damage they had done
And so time, with age,
It turns the page
Let the flesh
Submit itself to gravity
Let our bodies lay
Mark our hearts with shame
Let our blood in vain
You find God in pain
Now
If your convictions were a passing phase
May your ashes feed the river in the
morning rays
And as the vermin crawls we lay in the
foundations of decay
He was there the day the towers fell
And so he wandered down the road
And we would all build towers of our own
Only to watch the roots corrode
But it’s much too late
You’re in the race
So we’ll press
And press ‘til you can’t take it anymore
Let our bodies lay
Mark our hearts with shame
Let our blood in vain
You find God in pain
And if by his own hand his spirit flies
Take his body as a relic to be canonized
Now
And so he gets to die a saint but she will
always be a whore
(You look stressed out!)
Against faith! (cage all the animals!)
Against all life! (‘cause the message must be pure!)
Against change! (you can wander through the ruins!)
We are plagued! (but the poison is the cure)
You must fix your heart
And you must build an altar where it swells
When the storm it gains
and the sky it rains
Let it flood
Let it flood
Let it wash away
And as you stumble through your last crusade
Will you welcome your extinction in the morning rays?
And as the swarm it calls we lay in the foundations—
Yes, it comforts me much more
Yes, it comforts me much more
To lay in the foundations of decay
Get!
Up!
Coward!
Listen to the song while reading the lyrics and leave a comment with your interpretation of the song!
That’s all for now. Thank you all for your patience, for being here, and stay tuned for more.
Glad to see you guys are doing well and moving on to the editing/creating phase. Thanks for the update, and I love all the ideas presented in this piece !
Thanks for this. A broad and thought-provoking read.