Even in death, Klee Benally is subversive. This punk musician, this Diné Navajo, this Indigenous Spirit, calls out this devouring civilisation of ours for the reckoning it is pushing us towards.

We Irish can surely hear something in Klee’s call. We too were broken, beaten and colonised. Our land stolen from us. Our earth-centred civilisation overturned.

Perhaps, if we put our ears close enough to the ground and wait long enough in silence; if we dig our hands into the soil; if we rise up by slowing down – by retreating from the addictive soup of Big Tech conveniences and trivial kicks we surround ourselves with – we will understand properly what he is saying.

“Some chance of that,” a voice in the background whispers. And so onwards we go, full-tilt towards the edge.

Klee Benally

GREEN TRANSITION

This civilisation is doomed. We are devouring everything the earth can produce at an accelerating rate. With every passing year, we speed even faster towards the apocalypse. And we have somehow convinced ourselves that the accelerator is the brake – that, to save ourselves, we have to move even faster and break more things.

Far too many of us are, it seems, still firm believers in the fable that this twisted tech mindset – the core driver of environmental ruin – is somehow going to magically save us. We misdefine the wrong problem because we will do anything to avoid facing up to the reality that, as a species, we consume too much – way, way too much.

We fantasise that it’s an energy production problem. We delude ourselves that if we swap the fuel, and change the technology, we can just keep on going to the trough.

This hollow philosophy we call the ‘Green’ Transition. It is, in case you hadn’t realised, totally dependent on the wealthy countries of the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and more, being able to mine the hell out of the Global South (and soon Greenland and Ukraine!), turning Indigenous community lands into Green Sacrifice Zones.

Klee Benally, as with so many other Indigenous, have long seen through our phony Global North environmental concern. As

Klee puts it:

“Green futures are still dead futures for Mother Earth … If we start considering “necessary sacrifices” and “harm reduction” in the face of ecocide and genocide, we’ve already lost.”
I have to be clear: this whole, so-called ‘renewable’ energy, ‘Green Transition’ thing, is neither renewable nor sustainable.

Why? To build these ‘renewable’ machines, they have to go to Indigenous lands to get the copper, nickel, lithium and rare earths that are needed.

The facts matter so I am going to give this one to you again: mining one ton of rare earths creates 2,000 tons of toxic, often radioactive, waste. The mining oligarchs target the Indigenous lands where they have already created mountains of toxic filth by digging, digging and digging some more to extract the coal and oil and nuclear.

They don’t even stop digging up the coal, oil and gas. In fact, because of the surge in AI and data-centre demand, they’re digging up more coal than ever, and re-launching nuclear programmes.

So, in the lands of Klee Benally, and of Indigenous like him all over the world, there is no transition. There never will be any transition. The Indigenous lands where Klee grew up were known as Sacrifice Zones; now they’re known as Green Sacrifice Zones, overflowing with the pollution and toxins of modernity. As Klee, who died last year at 48 years of age, said:

“From deadly nuclear power to lithium and rare earth mining, and the privatisation of water, the greening of the economy is still a war against Mother Earth and all existence.

The proposition of unplugging from a ‘dirty’ power source and plugging into a ‘green’ one does nothing to address the underlying power relations. It reinforces them. ‘Green Energy’ sustaining a Green Economy still demands resource colonialism.”

COLONIAL RESISTANCE

The whole edifice of modern civilisation is a scam. It can only be maintained based on ecocide – that is, the kind of attack on Nature that Israel has been carrying out on Gaza. Without consuming its environment, civilisation cannot stand, and, of course, by consuming its environment civilisation must fall.

That’s the history of civilisation after civilisation after civilisation, going back thousands of years. It was the immediate environment that collapsed. And then the social edifices collapsed in upon themselves. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that is truly too big to fail is the environment itself. And this next collapse will be like no other, because this is the first truly global civilisation, and it is more voracious and more devouring that all previous civilisations put together.

To survive, we must, at some point, step out of the fake world of easy conveniences and cheap thrills that Big Tech has addicted us to, and walk in the real world without screens for support.

So much of the worst rot began with imperialism and colonialism. We Irish used to be a force for anti-colonial resistance. Well, for the avoidance of doubt, Big Tech are the new colonisers. They colonise our time, our minds, our data, and – increasingly with their data centres – our lands, water and electricity.

The only answer is that we must learn the art of resistance again. Reading Klee Benally’s scorching memoir, No Spiritual Surrender, would be a great place to start. I’ll leave the last words to him:

“The myth of modernity and its power is maintained through imagining its futurity. Instead of imagining Indigenous futures based on Euro-sourced sci-fi utopias, imagine a ceremony of unsettling colonial existence. Imagine the destruction of a machine as large as history. Leviathan? Nayee? Imagine the end of settler time.”

• No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred, by Klee Benally, is published by Detritus Books.
 • Klee Benally, Bandcamp