John Zerzan, an anarchist from Eugene, Oregon has claimed that civilization as we know it is pathological. We risk the extinction of all species so we can have momentary comforts. Thus, “green anarchism,” traces the origins of the problem far back into human history with the first domestication of plant and nonhuman animal life. Repeating much of what anthropology has known for years, green anarchism shows that agriculture was the first step in human exploitation of the earth and one another. It was out of this sedentary existence that patriarchy, war, and other forms of social domination arose. As such, we ought to be looking at what anthropologists have found out about nomadic bands. Though not completely free from all violence, many of these bands have never known warfare and are arranged in an egalitarian fashion.
Thus, civilization is a target of green anarchism because at its root, civilization is inherently violent and sets up various relationships of domination. As a way of life characterized by the growth of cities, civilization inevitably destroys its environmental surroundings. This is because as the population grows, it must denude an ever expanding swath of the landscape of the raw materials the civilization needs to survive. For example, the first civilization grew up in what is now southern Iraq (the Sumerians), but today, all that is left of those first cities is a vast desert, a testament to the massive ecological destruction that civilization wreaked.
Layla AbdelRahim presents her research on ontologies of wilderness and domestication in children's literature at the 2010 conference "In the beginning: Anarchism, Christianity and the Roots of Resistance" in Portland, Oregon.
Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. Bantam Books. 1992. A fictional, philosophical novel that argues we're headed to societal collapse due to the civilizational drive to consume, populate, grow, build, exploit, dispossess, and take more resources than the earth can sustain. It provides a historical account of civilization and the ethics and ideas underlying this project. It further highlights the divide between the Takers of agriculturally-based civilizations and the Leavers of the gathering and hunting modes of production.