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Can Life Prevail?

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If you're concerned about our environment, you have two options. You can be an "environmentalist" and support optional purchases of green products and laws that passively encourage pro-green actions, or you can be a conservationist, and favor setting aside natural spaces without humans in them.

But, as time goes on, it becomes clear that nothing will stop us as a species because we keep expanding, and each individual wants what the others have, so our needs always increase. Linkola offers a solution: drop our pretense of humanism and letting everyone have what they want, and recognize that the cause of our environmental catastrophe is the corrupt, selfish and lazy behavior of individuals. Money talks, and most individuals will sacrifice an old growth forest for a few hundred dollars.

As a result, this book breaks every taboo known to humankind and in doing so, tells us the truth that we so vigorously deny. Because we deny this obvious truth, we can never fix our biggest problems, as the last century shows us. If we summon our maturity and bravery, and peer around inside Linkola's head, we can see possible solutions.

This collection of essays works well for me as a reader because the essays chosen and the order in which they are presented works us gently into Linkola's thought, and shows us the breadth of his vision in terms of its practical applications -- this is not airy theory, but boots on the ground observations backed up by sound reasoning. If our species survives, the kind of thinking that exists in this book will someday be the norm, where today is it violently denied.

It seems the publisher had a few problems with layout in the production of this book, but they are small and easily bypassed.

Pentti Linkola is a controversial ecophilosopher, well-known as a deeply committed environmentalist in his Finnish homeland, but fairly unknown outside Scandinavia. That is, until now. "Can Life Prevail?" is the first book by Linkola in English and consists of articles and shorter essays spanning more than a decade of radical environmentalist thought. The topics range from childhood reflections, food hygiene, and bird watching to deforestation and terrorism. Pentti Linkola is a man who has lived and seen the things he talks about. He's not just another trendy green trying to cash in on a political trend; Linkola lives environmentalism. He's protecting a heritage, or as he puts it himself: "Fighting for forests means fighting for Finland. If the forest is flayed, Finland is flayed."

The essence of Linkola's ecophilosophy is conservationism: the whole of our biodiversity carries an intrinsic value. That means protecting ancient forests and rare species is more important than driving an SUV to work, buying every new shiny product from the supermarket, and throwing trash where it suits you. Linkola's plan to stop ecocide is simple: roll back human expansion to sensible levels and return to a local, practical and simpler lifestyle in harmony with nature. Linkola, to be fair, is cynical about the situation. He recognizes that a society too focused on individual desire will always satisfy special public interests instead of looking at the cold reality. That is why he proposes radical solutions to radical problems.

Most of what Linkola says, although it would force even the most radical green-leaning liberal to back down, is close to what many of us would call traditional common sense. We only have one planet. One life. We need to protect the biodiversity that inhabits this Earth, or else we fail as a species on what is possibly the most important mission before us. Linkola's cry, "Can Life Prevail?," does not just ask the question--it provides us with an answer to how we can win.

I have been interested in Pentti Linkola for the past few years. His writings are interesting...they are thought provoking, and they are brutally honest. Is he always right? No. Is he usually? Yes.

This 'book' is really a collection of Linkola's essays over the years. The translation appears to be quite good, with what minimal Finnish I know.

Linkola approaches things from a combination of the Schumacher 'Small is Beautiful' approach with a Fascist approach. In other words, like Schumacher, Linkola favors the local, the rural, the ecological. From the Fascist standpoint, Linkola is in favor of forced sterilization, population control, and the like.

Let the reader beware...if you are a left leaning environmentalist, there is much here that will 'offend the senses'. However, those are the people who should read this book. Environmentalism does not make sense when approached from most angles. Linkola's version makes perfect sense. Scary, but logical.

It is long past due for Linkola to be translated and published in English. His flavor of radical environmentalism deserves a hearing and wider audience. As has been suggested by others, Linkola serves up strong meat and it will not be palatable to many people. He is one of the few who is actually saying something worth hearing.

Pentti Linkola is easily the most notorious man in Finland. Occasionally, he is mentioned in Swedish newspapers, too. The first time I've heard about him was about 30 years ago! Since Finnish isn't even remotely close to Swedish, I have never been able to read the man's works, however. "Can life prevail?" is apparently the only English translation of Linkola available.

Linkola calls himself a deep ecologist, but there is very little spirituality in his message. In fact, there is none. Instead, we get a melange of love for nature, attacks on modernity, and calls for an authoritarian Green state, amidst a lot of misanthropy. Linkola even supports al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center. It's the misanthropic and authoritarian streaks that makes Linkola notorious, but these very traits are sometimes difficult to take seriously. Indeed, the American editors suspect that Linkola might be something of an trickster. Even Linkola himself implies as much in one of his articles.

My first memory of Linkola (around 1985) is a weird proposal that a Green Finland should get hold of nuclear weapons and wage war against the rest of the world! This book also contains proposals difficult to take seriously, including a call for a World Government to stop overpopulation, a proposal hardly compatible with the pro-farmer localism and nature nostalgia otherwise espoused by the author. And what are we to make of the following programmatic statement: "The people most responsible for the present economic growth and competition will be transferred to the mountains and highlands to be re-educated. To be employed for this purpose will mostly be ex-sanatoriums with a healthy climate located on pine ridges". Rather than sending them to the salt mines, then?

In all fairness, it should be noted that most of "Can life prevail?" deal with other and more normal issues. Linkola writes about his life as a fisherman and fish salesman, about his hikes in the Finnish woods, and he discusses issues such as vegetarianism, animal rights and conservation. Still, he does manage to crack a few provocative ideas here as well, as when he proposes the extermination of all domestic cats. He doesn't like jays, ravens and gulls either. Needless to say, Linkola is no vegetarian. He (correctly) points out that a hard life without technology would entail hunting and meat eating. More surprising, given his overall misanthropy, is the quasi-feminist idea that women, really, are much better than men! Another provocation?

I'm not sure what to make of Pentti Linkola, the resident eco-fascist of the Finnish forests, and he probably is the kind of guy who would drive most people mad. Still, a big thanks to Integral Tradition Publishing (sounds scary) for making the thoughts of this log cabin philosopher available in an intelligible language...

Pentti Linkola is an original European thinker who is respected by many figures in the Deep Ecology movement. Warning. His solutions for today's environmental crisis are grim. If all else fails, he openly advocates a totalitarian system that will force reductions in the world population and force responsible ecological behavior. I don't agree with a lot of what he says but Linkola deserves to be respected for his honesty. The scale of today's deepening global environmental crisis is not going to be solved by happy talk about a painless transition to "green jobs". This is nonsense. We need green jobs but the cost of a transition to a sound society will be very high... which is why political leaders don't want to deal with real reforms and would instead choose to engage in political "greenwashing". This book should be read in connection with James Lovelock's The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. Billions of people are likely to die if our world does not change course. We should be aware of what is at stake in the debate about the global environment. In a worst case scenario the human damage to our planet could even wipe out most life. I believe there is hope and that Linkola's grim solutions can be avoided. Some good ideas are in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition. However, time is rapidly running out.

Linkola is certainly not for everyone. This is a man who praises the tactics of 9-11 on pp. 162 "Bulls Eye" because "the US is the most wretchedly villainous state of all times." He then makes a comparison between 9-11 as a fight against an overpowering and gigantic enemy and the Finnish winter war. If you look at the cover of the book closely you will see that the background is one of the twin towers so this a major part of the book. He also has a vendetta against cats as they are highly destructive of native Finn wildlife. What's not to like about a guy like this! His political thinking makes Osama bin Laden and all the radicals in Islamic history look like a bunch of little Hamlets. What is undeniable, and what makes him so interesting, is his overall brilliance coupled with a harsh undeniable logic about what we assume is good about humanity and human progress. The 7,000,000,001st person on earth is just not as valuable as the 101st Panda I think is pretty clear after reading Linkola.
He argues the decreasing marginal value of human life and rights in general based on numerical scale just like any other economic item:
"my logic refuses to accept that the value and rights of a human individual might remain the same ever since the beginning of time regardless of how many humans there are on the planet. It is quite clear to me that the net increase in humans is constantly lowering the value of existing individuals." pp 122
Yikes, the man does have a point there.
Likewise his arguments against democracy, human rights, the veneration of science, technology and economic progress all make me critically examine what I had assumed since childhood. "human rights = death sentence for all Creation" pp. 122
Definitely not for the faint of heart or the romantic humanist that is for sure.

Brian Anse Patrick is a Professor in the Department of Communication at University of Toledo. He is author of the books "Rise of the Anti-Media: In-Forming America's Concealed Weapon Carry Movement" ;" The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage"; and "The Ten Commandments of Propaganda." He offers the following book review.


Re Linkola: Looking for some cheap dystopic thrills? Put down your Orwell and pick up Pentti Linkola's latest environmental hortatory, a compilation of essays, translated into English for the first time from the original Finnish. Probably the biggest difference between Orwell and Linkola is that in 1984 Orwell intentionally presented a dark futuristic extrapolation based on the world-politics of his day. Linkola's vision for a totalitarian regime based on "deep" ecology seems more an unintended side effect of long brooding at high latitudes.

While some have praised Linkola as a tough, realistic thinker, others associate him with eco-fascism. Yet others, including himself, seem to see him, first, as a savior to the Environment and, a distant second, to the human race, at least what would survive of it under Linkola-ism.

After diagnosing the Earth's ecological malady in easily understandable terms that indicate much first hand naturalistic experience--the counting of bird species, a career as a commercial fisherman and thousands of hours observing the great Finnish woodlands--Linkola prescribes what would be essentially a return to the Dark Ages. This is the only way, he says, to save the planet from Man's coming environmental crisis. Government regulators would carefully ration the firewood that would light and heat this new Age. Thicker clothing and bodies would provide most indoor heat. Food would be grown on sustenance plots, manually: no mechanized farm equipment. Most of the population would work at menial tasks related to food growing and processing. Few roads. No new construction. No carbon footprints from personal or family motor vehicles. No media--and use of paper would be cut to two percent of present production, this being sufficient to transmit culture. (Whose culture one wonders?) After a few generations of government regulation of procreation, one child to one woman except for the case of exceptional individuals, with licenses denied to homes perceived as "genetically inadequate or unsuitable" (p. 193) the population would decrease three-dimensionally, in absolute numbers, shrinkage of average height by 20 centimeters (8 inches) and by weight, thus removing so much more overwhelming human blight. Those given over to mindless economic development would be reeducated and resettled. And the almost incredible statement, discoveries unrelated to preservation of technology "will not be allowed."

Move over, Mao. Here comes Linkola.

There's much more. Just a sampling: human stupidity, says Linkola, reaches its "climax" with mass democracy. Man must therefore be led. Cats, which Linkola sees as an invasive species thriving on natural fauna, would be an endangered species in Linkola Land.

Nostalgia, once categorized as a disease in its extreme forms, haunts these essays. In this I find Linkola sympathetic, but only up to a point. He laments changes for the worse during his lifetime. He is aggrieved by loss of natural beauty. Finnish forestry planning has put economic development above the preservation of life. He mourns the disappearing birds of the forest and the fishes of the sea. He waxes indignant about government regulations that required refrigeration of fish taken to market. Back in his days refrigeration wasn't necessary. The "hygiene scare" is modern foolishness. Children should lick floors and eat compost to develop a healthy Darwinian resistance.

Perhaps the scariest aspect is that, allowing for a few notches of adjustment, many of Linkola's sentiments are quite common. If one has spent much time in the woods or in the mountains, or outside the cities, one mourns uncontrolled and apparently useless development, e.g., America just can't have enough strip malls, apparently. It's just that Linkola's ideations on these subjects are oddly refracted, amplified and projected. But internal sadness does not mean the world is dying.

I do recommend this book for a number of reasons. It reminds me of the prototypical philosophers of another totalitarian movement--Nazism: the Treitschkes, Wagners, Chamberlains, Nietzsches and Gobineaus who wove the skein that the soft hands of other intellectuals later twisted into a hyper-rational bureaucracy dedicated to Thanatos. We must remember that careerist intellectuals have been the great spinners of the absolutist nightmares of the 20th Century. We can only guess how Linkola will inform future bureaucracies.

But I may be overstating the case. It may well be that Linkola will inform just another harmless social political fad, e.g., the current sustainability craze. For example the woman's urban sustainability garden that sprouted up at my University, fertilized by about $50,000 dollars in grants donated by the evil corporate sector, aided by dragooned grad student and facilities labor, produced, in addition to a great deal of sanctimonious cant and signifying behaviors, approximately a peck of jalapeno peppers as its only edible product, as humans generally do not eat exotic grasses. The soft-handed do not make very practical gardeners. Fueled now by even more enviro-talk and government seed monies, there is much talk about transforming the ravaged house lots of America's inner cities into small farms. This, from persons who have never grown a radish, have never sweated over weeds, and whose idea of natural sustenance (for themselves) is a walk through the organic produce section at the whole food store.

Finland has long had one of the highest suicide rates in the world--in an underlying sense Linkola's book recommends a form of cultural suicide. Maybe, via Linkola, Finland is now trying to become a suicide exporter.

Beware the "reasonable existence" of Pentti Linkola.

Brian Anse Patrick, Associate Professor

Department of Communication

University of Toledo