The Myth of an Inert, Passive Earth
Chapter 10 of My Book: Ten Myths of Progress
I had to skip posting this last week with all the craziness online. I didn’t want it to get buried, because this is the capstone of my book, Ten Myths of Progress. Sadly, people are still hyper focused on “left vs right” narratives (which is what “they” want). Forget the genocide in Gaza, the Epstein files, let alone the global ecocide that both parties seemingly couldn’t care less about. Sure our dive towards authoritarianism is of great concern, but its too be expected in some ways, what with the oligarchs running off with all the loot while the planet withers. They’ll pit us against each other as long as they can, but eventually they’ll have to crack down on growing dissent.
Here at Collapse Curriculum you can expect to find focus on things that are real, not what the billionaires who own the media want you to grind your mind over. Below you will find an extensive preview of the chapter, and the full chapter available for paid subscribers.
Earth, nature, our planet, our mother (whatever name you wish to assign), gave us life. But in the dominant culture, she’s treated like dirt (you see what I did there?). Let’s talk about how and why this myth of a passive Earth got started, and the results. First, let me reflect on my own experience to illustrate.
Childhood Lessons of a Silent World
Growing up in Sunday school, I learned that the Earth was made for us. Thus quoteth from Genesis: that God gave man “dominion” over the Earth, that the land was created for our use, that it was our divine duty to multiply and replenish. Dominion meant power over… not relational reciprocity. The Earth was not a relative or a teacher, rather simply a stage, a backdrop, a warehouse of resources waiting for our hands.
That lesson was everywhere once I started looking for it. It was in the stories of my Mormon ancestors who trudged across the plains, the Mormon Trail that led to the “founding” of Salt Lake City. Brigham Young arrived and declared “this is the place.” Turns out it was a place to revere as industrious, symbolized by the beehive which still is centered on the state flag.
Of course never mind that people were already there when Young and co “discovered” it. The narrative was one of empty land waiting to be filled, tamed, and made productive. Industriousness itself was seen as sacred.
Let me share a joke that illustrates:
Mormon bishop dies and goes to the great beyond, where he is surprised to be met by St. Peter at the Pearly gates. Peter says, I hate to tell you this, but you Mormons have totally been wrong all this time. You need to wait here for the devil, and he’s going to take you down to hell.
The devil comes and gets the bishop and they start their descent into hell. At the first level, the bishop thinks, wow, this is pretty hot and uncomfortable. At the second level he starts complaining. At the third level he is sweating bullets. “This is unbearable.” “Ha!” says the devil. “You’re going down one more level!” They finally get to the next level, encompassed by searing heat. Truly excruciating. The devil smirks, takes out his keys and opens the door….to reveal lush meadows, sparkling streams, and beautiful landscape.
“Damn Mormons” the devil exclaims, “They’ve been irrigating again!”
Ah, look at that! Utah in its state of natural being is essentially Hell. That’s the crux of the joke.
Years later, at a rally against fossil fuels, a Navajo woman approached me to ask what we were doing. I explained and she shrugged off our efforts. I was surprised by this, as we had Native people speaking at the rally. I inquired further with her as to why she wasn’t concerned about climate change. She explained she was Mormon herself, and that God had taken the land from her people because they hadn’t used it. In her words, I heard an echo of the very theology I had been raised on: land left wild was land forfeited. Wasted land. Land waiting for a better people to bring it into purpose.
In some weird twist of fate, I had turned away from this theological framing of Earth, and she, a Native woman, had accepted it. Without diving down that rabbit hole, suffice to say I was bewildered and thought I had met my nemesis.
Now I know you might be thinking this is all fascinating, but ‘I didn’t grow up religious’ and don’t have these ideas baked in. It isn’t just just religion my friends. It was in school, where geology and geography dissected the Earth in terms of the resources it provides humanity.
It was in the Oregon Trail computer game, which taught us to see the West as a frontier to be conquered. It was in television where westerns, Swiss Family Robinson, even Star Trek take us on a moral arc of discovering, colonizing, and taming.
It was in the toys of my childhood: bulldozers, tanks, fighter jets, Chevron trucks and oil tankers, these the glorified instruments of destruction, industry, and war. Even play was a rehearsal for control.
As a teenager it was in computer games like SimCity and Civilization, where the point was always expansion, extraction, building, growth. The highest score went to the biggest empire.
Even my neighborhood carried the lesson. A lawn left wild was not “natural” but derelict. Good citizens tamed their yards, cutting down wildness until the grass was uniform and trimmed. Everywhere I looked, I was taught that to leave land alone was shameful, even dangerous. And if nature resisted, whether by storm, earthquake, or wildfire… it was cast as cruel, hostile, something to be subdued or insured against.
From scripture to schoolbooks, from toys to television, I was taught the same thing: the Earth is passive. The Earth is raw material. The Earth has no voice until we put words in its mouth. And if it isn’t used, it is wasted.
Defining the Myth
The myth of the passive Earth is the belief that the planet is inert matter, a backdrop for human drama, and a stockpile of resources awaiting our use. It frames the Earth not as alive, relational, or self-regulating, but as a silent object whose only value comes from what we can extract, tame, or transform. In this story, humans are the sole actors; the Earth is the stage. We shape history, while the world itself has no agency, no voice, no role except to serve.
This myth is encoded into our language. We speak of “natural resources,” as though forests and rivers exist only to be consumed. We call living beings “raw materials,” as though the world is unfinished until industry reshapes it. Even ecology, that supposed science of life, has been colonized by economic terms: “ecosystem services,” where the value of rivers and bees is measured not in their own flourishing, but in what they do for us.
The same framing shapes global politics. Nations are divided into “developed” and “developing,” a clearly stated hierarchy that assumes the end goal is always more industrial growth, consumer markets, and integration into the global economy. The phrase hides a judgment: countries that live differently are not simply different, they are “behind” or even “backward.” They have not yet harnessed the Earth “properly.” (Sorry for all the scare quotes)
Even sustainability, a word meant to signal caution, has been absorbed into this logic. We are told that renewable energy will save us, that efficiency will buy us more time. But the answer is never to stop expanding. It is never to ask whether endless growth itself might be the problem. Instead, the goal is always to find a cleaner way to continue the same trajectory of more consumption, more development, more human control. The Earth is still framed as raw material, only now the extraction is labeled “green.”
When asked about the ecosystems wiped out to site solar panels (feel free to watch the videos), advocates for renewable energy will often say we have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. As my friend Derrick likes to point out, why is the eggs we break always those from plant and animal communities like the endangered desert tortoise, and NEVER our golden eggs of prosperity, economics, convenience, comfort, entertainment, gadgets, etc.?
We even grant corporations personhood, with rights and protections, but the Earth itself remains without a legal voice. Watersheds cannot sue for their own defense. Mountains cannot testify against their destruction. Forests cannot vote. When ecosystems collapse, the language remains passive: “natural disasters,” “resource depletion,” “environmental externalities.” The violence disappears in the words.
The myth of the passive Earth is baked deep into our grammar, a worldview encoded into how we talk about land, people, and power. And once you see it, you notice how total it is. Every solution offered to our ecological crisis, whether sustainable development, renewable energy, carbon markets, all begin with the assumption that the Earth is an object, silent and inert, waiting to be managed. Never a subject, never a being, never a voice.
Historical Roots – From Agriculture to Mastery
The myth of the passive Earth did not arise in a vacuum. It is rooted in the very birth of civilization itself. When humans shifted from nomadic foraging to settled agriculture, the relationship to land transformed. What was once a web of reciprocity became a system of control.
Agriculture produced surplus. This meant more food than could be consumed immediately. Surplus meant storage, and storage meant settlement. But surplus also invited theft, which demanded defense. Villages gave rise to walls, walls gave rise to armies, and militarization soon became inseparable from agriculture itself. With militarization is birthed patriarchy.
The Earth was no longer a living partner but a field to be plowed, guarded, and expanded.
