The following is the full text from Kenny Ausubel’s keynote address at Bioneers 2025.
As the U.S. approaches the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution next year, the Republic is in the throes of a hostile takeover by the same kinds of imperial monarchs and oligarchs the rebels sought to overthrow. At this hinge moment when the climate emergency demands an immediate systemic civilizational overhaul, this retrograde counter-revolution is working to drill, baby, drill, make feudalism great again, and colonize Mars.
As the late Mike Davis put it, “In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds.”
We have to believe that sufficient forces in the country will mobilize to stop this imperial coup in its tracks. The one certainty is that we’re living through times of radical uncertainty. Flocks of black swan events are poised to derail their best-laid plans. Their policies are so wildly unpopular and warped that a raging popular backlash is inevitable as the harms hit home.
No matter the odds, we’ve got to unwaveringly keep advancing the life-affirming work of restoring nature and people. The policy is not complicated. Taking care of nature means taking care of people – and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Meanwhile, nature has stopped knocking and is simply blowing the doors off. As civilization is brought to its knees, slouching toward sustainability is not an option. Our salvation depends on regenerating the vitality of our ecosystems while leaning into community, connection and belonging – holding close the love, justice, diversity and equity that weave true democracy.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen,” offers lucid political perspective. “Authoritarianism, at its core, is about restricting or eliminating the rights of the many and giving vast new liberties to the very few… It rearranges government so that the rich can become even richer. The corruption and entitlement will be so extreme that the eyes of many will be opened.
“And then, one day, there will be a reckoning.It will come after the revelations and realizations of the terrible damage done by this autocratic government to the social safety net, to data privacy, to our well-being, to the very concept of human dignity in labor and life.
“From this reckoning,” she concludes, “we can work to realize democracy’s potential as the expression of social justice, inclusivity, equity, and solidarity, and love.”
It’s important to understand what we’re facing. It’s the predictable climax of a 50-year power grab launched by big business in the 1970s to re-capture the government. The mission has been to demolish the reforms that improved the lives of the many with the New Deal and the Great Society and War on Poverty programs of the ’60s. The oligarchs have used the fog of culture war to cancel the social revolutions of racial justice, feminism, gay rights and the environmental movement.
Project 2025 is the apex of these savage policies, whose shadow architect Russell Vought now heads of the critical Office of Management and Budget. The agenda is the same old song: massive tax cuts for the rich, promiscuous deregulation, insatiable privatization, and the clear-cutting of social programs and services.
As the zealous ideologue boasted, “I would rather burn this money in a parking lot than have it go for the types of things it is going for.”
As ProPublica points out, “Vought’s plan has been to do as much damage as possible to the machinery of the state in a short window of time, crippling it to the point that it ceases to properly function and can’t be easily put back together — or justifies further dismantling.”
In other words, it’s asymmetric warfare by nihilists who’d rather burn it down than lose.
Here the plot thickens. In his book “Crack-up Capitalism,” historian Quinn Slobodian chronicles the rise of a mutation of world-historic importance – capitalism without democracy. As the arch-libertarian tech billionaire and now political kingmaker Peter Thiel summed up “anarcho-capitalism” in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Sometimes called “zonal capitalism,” Thiel’s brand of “anarcho-capitalism” pierces holes in nation states to liberate and shelter mobile global capital from any societal constraints or obligations. There are now between 5,400 to 7,000 of these special zones worldwide. They’re essentially glorified company towns operated under corporate law, untethered from state regulation.
They now comprise an interlinked web of global command-and-control financial centers, from Hong Kong, Singapore and Shenzen to London, Dubai and South Africa. Historian Nils Gilman calls it “plutocratic secession.”
At their most extreme, anarcho-capitalists such as the intellectual godfather Murray Rothbard have ardently advocated that all services be purchased through the market, with no social safety net whatsoever. Contracts replace constitutions. People are no longer citizens of a place, but clients of a menu of service providers.
Rothbard and company’s ideology subscribes to biologically hard-wired racial hierarchy and the Great Replacement Theory – just as Peter Thiel has said giving women the vote was a mistake.
As Rothbard summed it all up: “We shall repeal the twentieth century.”
As long as we’re rolling back the clock, it turns out the Middle Ages are a cultural fetish among this crowd. It includes annual cosplay medieval re-enactments drawing 10,000 enthusiasts. They yearn for a return to Game of Thrones feudal fiefdoms and fortified city states. In other words, repeal the Millennium.
“Make Feudalism Great Again” is not hyperbole. Suit up for the new Dark Ages.
Crack-up capitalism has sought to undermine the nation state by constructing these enclaves of capitalism without the ballot box. Meanwhile, the advent of the Internet spawned the anarcho-capitalist fever dream called “accelerationism.” It red-pilled in the cloud and then jumped the matrix.
Political science professor Andrea Molle sums up the apocalyptic ideology thus: “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.”
Molle observes that Elon Musk’s “techno-accelerationism” aims to destroy the existing order to create a technologized hierarchy directed by omniscient engineers – a high-IQ superclass of white men. Molle suggests that such a techno-fascist government might essentially mimic the wireless system that operates Teslas, which empowers the corporation to remotely alter the software at will – that is, the software of information, laws and rules.
But once again, the plot thickens. The Tech Broligarchy unexpectedly managed to buy the presidency and Republican Party. Their endgame is no longer to escape the state. Instead, they’ve launched a hostile takeover to reconstruct it under their private ownership.
Now that these Funding Fathers have caught the national car, they’re reprogramming it to make corporate governance and techno-monarchy the basis of a society operated on terms and conditions, not rights and obligations.
If it all sounds completely insane, it is – and it gets even worse.
Elon got his odd name from a novel called “Project Mars” by Werner Von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist whom the US government recruited after the war. In that book, the Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was entitled the ‘Elon.’”
In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose reign was aborted by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”
The Elon has lived up to his name. In 2012, he explained that his multi-planetary vision for building rockets to go to Mars was that “It might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilizational collapse.” Naturally, the pickled consciousness would be that of his white male high-IQ superclass. Godspeed, dudes.
About a week and a half ago, hundreds of fires broke out everywhere all at once across Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. The historic climate-enhanced global weirding and high winds whipped up a blinding dust storm that caused dozens of car crashes around Lubbock and Amarillo. Social media doomscrolled a dystopian horror show. A man making one of the videos could be heard saying, “You want to go to Mars? This is Mars.”
So while the Elon pursues Mars-a-Lago, Trump’s quest for so-called “energy dominance” is deploying tariffs as an extortion racket to prop up the declining fossil fuel regime by compelling other countries to buy US natural gas. In fact, natural gas contributed little to new grid capacity in 2024, while renewables have continued to spike to record levels.
Solar and wind are far cheaper, safer and much faster to bring online. 95% of all new power capacity added to the grid in 2024 was carbon-free, a staggering 47% increase compared to 2023’s record year. Developers built over 100 very large-scale projects in 24 states. About eighty percent of the gushing investments are in red districts.
The most important driver of US growth in clean energy has been the Inflation Reduction Act. Gutting the IRA is going to be the skunk at the garden party in red America.
Meanwhile, China has seized the future of energy dominance with renewables and green tech, which already comprises a whopping 10% of its exports.
China dominates the supply chain and the trifecta of lithium-ion batteries, solar panels and EVs. EVs constituted 40% of cars sold in China last year. In response to tariffs, in 2024 Chinese exports fast-forwarded the record distribution of renewables across the global South.
Although the urgent transition to renewables is crucial, it’s already too late just to reduce emissions. In order to retrieve a habitable planet, the imperative is carbon drawdown. Machines are a fool’s errand because it’s not rocket science – it’s biology, which is far more complex.
Brett KenCairn, the Senior Policy Advisor for Climate and Resilience for the City of Boulder’s Climate Initiatives Team, suggests we look to nature.
“Climate change is not happening because of some simple geochemical machine equation of CO2 in, CO2 out. The atmosphere is actually a biologically mediated dynamic. It’s the byproduct of the respiratory process of the entire planet.
“The fact that we have been degrading the living world for 12,000 years has contributed almost as much carbon into the atmosphere from that land degradation as burning fossil fuels. It’s the mechanism that could have otherwise buffered all those changes.
“It’s the regeneration of the living world that is the true hope of us being able to solve both climate change and a whole series of other existential challenges. When we start to work with living systems, we can start to engage other hugely valuable and powerful cycles like the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the terrestrial energy cycle.
“This is why biodiversity is so important. Biodiversity is that integrator. We need all these different members of our community, who all have very important jobs, to be integrating those cycles. When that happens, remarkable and miraculous healing can take place. And by the way, we’re essential to that.”
As Kencairn points out, we’ve regenerated landscapes at scale before. During the ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, we decided as a society to mobilize millions of people and apply significant resources to regenerating the natural world, including planting literally billions of trees.
KenCairn has now formed a special nature-based solutions unit in Boulder’s climate action program, and he works with expanding national networks.
We need tens of thousands of Brett KenCairns applying nature’s operating instructions locally everywhere, and sharing practices and data. The ground truth is that the solutions residing in nature surpass our conception of what’s even possible. This has been a cornerstone of Bioneers since our inception in 1990, when it wasn’t on the radar screen.
Today the nature-based solutions space is poised to surge – and a deep bow to all of you here working on this.
In practical terms today, it’s the last stand for many landscapes. Now is the time to stand for what Janine Benyus lovingly calls “the real world.” We’ve got to prioritize the conservation and regeneration of the ecosystems on which all life depends, and advance nature-based solutions.
Along with cutting-edge contemporary sciences, invaluable Traditional Ecological Knowledge comes to us from ancient Indigenous land-management practices, principles and ethics. These are the true biotechnologies.
Inspired by the late biologist E.O. Wilson’s 2016 book “Half Earth,” a growing global consortium is working hard to conserve half of the natural world by 2050. The 30X30 initiative has set a near-term target of 2030 to protect 30% of Earth’s remaining intact ecosystems and bioregions – both terrestrial and marine.
Meanwhile, the Rights of Nature movement has become the fastest-growing environmental movement in history, with Indigenous Peoples at the forefront worldwide. It flips the legal paradigm from nature as property to nature as rights-bearing. After all, we don’t own nature – nature owns us.
An object lesson comes to us from Australia. Years of increasingly apocalyptic fires finally forced the public to accept the reality of climate change. Voters decisively retired a slate of formerly secure, climate-denying conservative politicians and replaced them with pro-climate independents.
The country, while it has plenty of issues, is developing a civic model of ecologically informed governance, disaster preparedness, and effective cooperation between responsible government and a highly engaged citizenry.
They say the darkest hour comes right before the dawn. As climate breakdown bears down and democracy hangs in the balance, this existential reckoning is forcing people to look for real practical solutions and a renewed vision.
Speaking at Bioneers, Angela Glover Blackwell of PolicyLink suggested that America’s founding promise of equal rights for everyone was always aspirational, and now is the time to fulfill it. She said this:
“Our beautiful and exciting multi-racial coalition is the natural heir of the framers of the nation when they sat down to form a more perfect union.
“The framers punched way above their moral weight. The United States was founded on genocide for the purpose of stealing land, and human bondage for the purpose of slave labor. To justify that, there was developed a hierarchy of human value that then got baked into every institution. Addressing these wrongs is the only way to be able to go forward.
“In truth” Angela said, “the vast majority of Americans strongly support the same goals: policies and programs that invest in people, communities and the public good. Equity creates more, not less. It’s just like love. Love creates more. The more you love, the more you have. The more you give, the more you get. The economy does better, the democracy works better, our neighborhoods are better, we’re safer in the places that we live.
“That’s the definition of equity – just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, thrive, and reach their full potential. We understand that our difference is our strength.”
So here now, for this 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, it’s time for a Declaration of Interdependence. It’s time to make America grateful again.
So keep the faith – and as the labor organizer Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn – organize.”
