Donald Trump was right. There is a swamp. It’s not the ballast of the entrenched bureaucracies in DC that administer our laws. It’s the physics of planetary limits that will inevitably suck our civilization down into the graveyard of those that have gone before. How do we rescue ourselves?
I think about that all the time. I’m a “there must be a way” person, like millions of “solutionaries” who’ve come up with brilliant interventions in response to the assumption that “if everyone just… then we’d…”
What if everyone reduced consumption by 20% – we’d pull back from overshoot and collapse and “live well together within the means of the earth.” That was my big bet.
What if plastics were banned with strict enforcement and penalties – bags, toys, hospital throw-aways, packaging, manufacturing – and we went back to plant based and mineral alternatives used for millennia? I’d happily use waxed paper and paper bags and glass jars and rubber to give the rest of life some chance of a flourishing. Anyone remember when we used balled-up newspaper for packing breakables?
What if we cut fossil energy usage in half, and half again? Do you think that hasn’t been investigated, modeled, tested, deployed in some places? It’s not that we like oil. It’s actually foul. Smells foul. Tastes foul. But we like what it does for us, the energy slaves that heat our houses and run our machines.
What if we took seriously the many studies that say feeding the world through feeding fertility in the soil and freeing up land for smallholder farmers works far better than industrial scale agriculture? Regeneration and ecosystem restoration are being tested and deployed globally. With excellent results. Why not work with nature to heal herself?
What if we paid countries handsomely to preserve their remaining jungles and forests, but only if they enforce preservation?
What if manufacturers were required to take back products at the end of their useful life and required to dispose of them safely or pay hefty penalties?
What if we solved dire poverty by simply sharing the wealth more fairly? Even just a little fairer to start. Two yachts instead of three. Three houses instead of four. Is it that we have no tools for implementing greater fairness without stripping our economy of the incentive to invent, invest, and bring products to market? There are so many ways to liberate excess wealth from the ultra-rich and feed it into well-being for all without anyone feeling even a teensy-weensy pinch, without anyone screaming socialism someone stepped on their toes. We don’t lack knowledge of mechanisms for increased fairness without tanking the real economy. Just ask Elizabeth Warren.
In fact, as she says, we have plans for everything. For buildings that heat and cool themselves. For organic farms that feed their communities. For non-toxic ways to have fun. For conflict resolution that doesn’t depend on scorched earth war.
Don’t you ask yourself – maybe daily like I do – what’s in the way of doing any of this at sufficient scale and speed to actually reverse the damage and set life on a journey of flourishing? If frightening statistics would make it happen, it would have happened half a century ago. Something is missing. Something beyond what we have deployed in the past is needed. But what?
When Greta Thunberg says, “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope, but I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” The people in power listened politely … and then the meeting moved on.
If you’ve been addicted to anything, you know how sly our minds are when we know we should change but don’t want to – or can’t. I’ve been an early adopter, for example, on fuel efficient cars – the first hybrids, the first electrics. I have a whisper tou
ch on the gas pedal, glide to a stop, combine errands. But I’ve designed a life around having a car, so it would take a catastrophe to change that. Which, if you believe the climate science, is what’s happening. I have excuses. The ravages of aging. The distance to town. The inconvenience of arranging ride-sharing for everything. The social isolation from being out of step with society. The car is like a prosthesis, an extra limb that allows me to “run” an errand. And my society enables all of this because everyone is caught in it – or longs to get caught by getting a car in the first place.
If our biology, psychology and society are hooked, then what?
The first step, according to the incredibly successful Anonymous programs, is recognizing that whatever we are doing – however brilliant, respected, well-documented, approved-by-Oprah-or-Joe-Rogan – isn’t working. It’s not getting the result you want if you sincerely want to leave the planet in better shape than you found it.
If this is our condition, and we can’t admit it, why? Is there something we aren’t willing to see because seeing it would mean we have to do something we aren’t willing to do? Even if the future of everything we love depends on it? Or what?
To even ask this question without leaping to an answer is step one. To even admit you broke something precious and can’t fix it is the first step. Perhaps it’s just too much to feel the piercing grief of that. Our defenses come up. “Just because I live in the United States doesn’t mean I am responsible for the history of slavery.” :The plane would fly anyway, whether I’m in the seat or not.” Perhaps you are afraid to draw the ire of your tribe if you say the house is on fire. Perhaps you can’t bear feeling such nauseating shame.
Slow down. Breathe. Human beings are irrevocably decimating the world that birthed us. It’s not blame. It’s math.
Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life has a suggestion. In the scene “The Miracle of Birth: Part 2: The Third World” we see an impoverished family where the Dad, laid off from work, says to his 12+ kids he’s going to have to sell them for medical experiments.
DAD: I can’t keep you all here any longer! God has blessed us so much, I can’t afford to feed you anymore.
NIGEL: Couldn’t you have your balls cut off?
DAD: Hohh, it’s not as simple as that, Nigel. God knows all! He’d see through such a cheap trick. What we do to ourselves, we do to Him.
GIRL: You could have had them pulled off in an accident.
Isn’t this like many of our “if only they did this…” or “if only we did that…” solutions? They make perfect sense (at least to the kids about to be sent off for medical experiments) but if they violate a fixed belief without which life would have no meaning, they go nowhere.
Saint Paul said: “I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.”
We didn’t mean to do this. We meant to improve on Heaven. No one person woke up one day and decided to pull one thread in Gaia’s glorious garment and unravel the whole thing.
Paul’s answer is redemption in Christ. That we cannot redeem ourselves. We’ll keep doing what we don’t mean to do. Paul says that all things are possible in Christ. “If we just all believed in this beautiful representation of love, or any reasonable facsimile, then…”
It’s just that there’s no collective “we” that could have the faith of a mustard seed. “We” is a melee of fractious tribes that at very best takes a WWII Christmas break from killing one another and sings songs in the zone between the battle lines. “We” aspire to being a “we.” “We” talk about “we” as if “we” could speak for all others. “We” blame others for what “we” are suffering. And “we all” do that.
I am coming to face that I’m only talking to myself and people like me when I make sweeping “we” statements. In the 1990s – when my team and I were working to lower consumption in North America by getting Your Money or Your Life into every hand of every American – we-the-team calculated that the sum of audiences for all the shows we’d been on meant we reached half the country. If that wasn’t enough “we” to move the needle on consumerism, what will be?
Shakespeare offers another hint. In Julius Caesar, Cassius says to Brutus:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
How are they underlings? Yes, underlings to the powerful Caesar who intends to become emperor for life (sound like anyone we know?). Cassius and Brutus are not in positions of hierarchical power. Their status does not require Caesar to listen to them. They are also underlings in systems of power that define and enforce the rules, either legally of socially. What rules? Whose rules? The ones that were here when we got here and have become so resilient, and so pervasive, they’re just “the way things are done”. This is a formidable prison. Everyone is in it – Caesar, Brutus and Cassius. They play their hands, but the deck was crafted by history and culture and biology adapted to small tribal groups in large hunting territories.
We are rounding the bend to a climax, like Act 3 in a Shakespearean play, still arguing with the fates. Much cascading damage is well underway. Yet by this Act it feels the course is set, the tragedy will unfold.
This is how I see it now. We are trapped in a set of rules, customs and the anti-social grifters who lock in advantage but don’t actually control it: the rules of debt-based money, the rules of the financial markets, the rules made by politicians beholden to Wall Street, the rules of capitalism without compassion or conscience – which drives exploitation of land, people and cultures to the very last drop. “We’ve” set all this in motion, but “we” have no kill switch, no governor, that can stop the process.
In the Sorcerer’s Apprentice by Goethe, later popularized in Disney’s Fantasia, a young apprentice overhears his master’s incantation to start a process (and uses it to fetch buckets of water to mop the floor) but doesn’t know the incantation to stop it. All of his efforts to stop what he’s started only make it worse. Only when the sorcerer returns and stops the process is the apprentice saved.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Fantasia Sorcerer’s Apprentice – Fantasia
Likewise, it seems to me that we have unleashed energies we are not yet mature or wise enough to stop. By the first “we”, I mean the machinery of progress initiated by Western Europeans in the Renaissance and potentiated by the banking system and fossil energy. And the second “we” is the current fractious mob of tribal humans, caught in the jaws of destruction, who will not budge. Retribution, belonging, fear of banishment, fear of judgement, norms, and the ballast of normalcy are all powerful magnetic forces binding members of tribes together. Tribes of territory. Tribes of shared pain. Tribes of whoever they hold as the one true God. Tribes of class. Tribes of race. Tribes of the music, drugs, TV programs you prefer. Tribes of the victims, banding together. No enlightened, conscious, evolved “we” can open such jaws. Somehow, we the people need to become a “we” that can choose to stop the machine.
I am personally humbled before this predicament. I invite you to be humbled alongside me as we contemplate what we have unleashed. To let it stun our clever minds, abort our frantic protocols to save us, break our hearts finally as we feel the suffering caused by this incantation that we are not yet able to shut down. I am grateful to all the truth tellers who unsentimentally named our predicament – and stopped even my good works and good intentions long enough to feel the cost.
The first step: admit we are powerless over this addiction to the expansive energies of money and oil. And admit that life on earth has become unmanageable.
Nothing more. No more steps. Can “we” admit that “we” don’t know what to do.
You give voice to true leaven in the loaf of transformation and renewal; the overdue nourishment begins to sound its way in our shared heartbeat. Sing on
Wonderful , painful and honest piece of writing. Thank you Vicki.
It does feel as though this global civilization thingy is now so vast and so complex, and competition is so ingrained in its cultures & civic organizations that fostering a single mindset in enough individuals to engender large scale cooperation, as you describe, really seems Quixotic.
Perhaps scale will become everything, and what/who-ever survives through the next period will be locally focused, collaborative and collectively interdependent – on an individual basis, very resourceful.
In other, older words, all wagons may circle up, but many trains won’t make it through the winter… though some will.
Some great writing. WW1 not WW2.
Yes, yes and yes! Absolutely! Thank you for writing this and articulating so well what I have felt into for the longest time. I recognised all of these patterns in myself thirty years ago when I attended my first 12 Step meeting, woke up and then recognised it as the prevailing paradigm all around me. I also ask myself every day “what if everyone …”, but it does leave me with a sense of futility.
Thank you for naming it so eloquently.
We’ll be played off the stage, I mean, well we are being played off the stage now. Many countries have declining populations, one of the signals of ongoing economic collapse. Yes, we’ll bring down a large number of animals with us. That is truly sad.
There are a few long term questions in my mind. All the fossil fuels whose carbon we are releasing…..this carbon will be used by new trees that grow in coming millennia? Will the carbon we release enable more trees than ever to flourish on our planet? Or will the climate be too hot for them, the atmosphere gone? I see up to the point where humans and many animal species disappear, but I wonder beyond that, if the extra carbon is “good” or not?
“Most of us don’t realize the difference we could make. We love to shrug off our own responsibilities, to point fingers at others. ‘Surely,’ we say, ‘the pollution, waste, and other ills are not our fault. They are the fault of the industry, business, science. They are the fault of the politicians,’ This leads to a destructive and potentially deadly apathy.” – Jane Goodall
It’s exactly like that. My last bit of hope: that Nature is more powerful than our presidents and dictators and even our corporate masters. Where do we go from there? I’m working on it. Ask me in six months.
There are lots of people planing a No Spend Year. I plan to have a No Stuff year. I already live in a small space, am plant based, support local groceries when I can and stay mostly in my own county. My next challenge is to convince my husband that we can go car free. This is complex in a small town with modest bus service. With shared services I’m thinking it is doable. Perhaps not immediately but it is always good to be striving for something.
Billions of human and other-than-human species will perish in the coming decades. It’s inevitable. Best we can do is reduce our carbon impact, avoid reproduction, be of service to others, learn hospice skills, and be grateful for the time we have remaining.
Such a fine posting… yes, how appropriate to feather-in one of the steps.
There is a power in naming that which is occurring.
For me, no more powerful an expression than XR’s first demand, Tell the Truth.
Same could be said for Deep Adaptation. The single act of power that founds DA
is Jem’s declaration that there is no sustainability in Sustainability Leadership…
and that collapse is inevitable. The emperor has no clothes.
We should all be so lucky as to express this scale of, an Act of Power.
We are in a global human operating system that is awash in Perverse Incentives that
we dare not name, lest we be excluded from their delicious fruits.
Tragic and ironic.
Beautiful writing my friend.
Dean
What to do?
Well, a starter could be to become truly poor NOW.
If we had more time available, we should live in small villages with not more than 200 people, and be self-providing with food and energy. We could work at home, in the fields or in the next village, which we’d reach by means of bicycle.
Instead of endless material growth and cultural apathy, we could realize a steady-state economy, and finding growth and satisfaction in social life, culture, psychology, and deep religion where we can be dynamic and creative.
In such a setting, we need no leaders or hierachy, and could develop participatory democracy and mutual aid.
Cheers, Björn Lindgren
SWEDEN
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Wish you hadn’t started it with “Donald Trump was right.” Makes me throw up a little.
got your attention though. that’s what a lead is for. i like using irony and counterpoint.
Yes, Vicki. Brilliant, meaning clearly observed.
We oh-so-smart humans have evolved to misuse our potential for self-awareness to block out what appears glaringly clear to us… our individual demise. Death. And unable to fathom that, to accept that on a personal level, we bury that pain, that truth by consuming endless “stuff.” “Stuffing” ourselves. Our culture likens being sated to being eternal. Being stuffed is our religion, and all facets of culture buy into this. Neither words (logic) nor wars have much chance of shifting our fundamentalist beliefs.
Unlikely as we are to embrace it, our route to species continuity is the return to the indigenous wisdom that we are part of the earth, part of nature, and like everything in it, we will pass on without a trace. Only then might we see how gathering stuff hurts our tribe and every species. I believe collapse is the only teacher capable of bringing this about. Sadly, what state(s) we collapse into comes with no guarantee of continuity. Still we must take care of those around us, because any pother approach compounds disaster.
and thats just the sustainability of the capitalist growth agenda – other major problems are how we limit the technology we are unleashing : AI and genetic modification for starters – and keep some sort of world that anyone would want to live in
I think I do know what to do.
Gandhi showed the way:
Non-violent. Non-participation.
Hunger strike.
“I will not eat again until everyone stops burning.”
Yes, I will certainly starve to death.
Too bad no one on Earth will give one single shit about a loser like me doing something like that.
Dying alone and utterly unloved. Hell, probably even ridiculed for it.
So I guess I won’t.
“Somehow, we the people need to become a “we” that can choose to stop the machine.”… That sentence jumps out at me. WE THE PEOPLE are not who govern. Stop believing we have any clout to effect any policy is the first step. I confess I don’t know how to fix that either. But, for me, in my opinion, which may be lauded or denigrated by your readers, I believe we need to stop trusting in who we tribally trust to “fix” things. As you said, they are not going to do it. Too much self-interest and aggrandizement right there. S-o-o-o Stop putting one’s trust in those who have power.
Place our trust in the humanity that CAN exist in all of us, to care about one another. There is this illustration which comes to mind: Six foot long utensils are given to the residents of both heaven and hell to eat with, and they are told that those are what they must use to obtain food from the plates of luscious food in front of them. If they try to grab the food any other way, it will disappear. Exact same situation for both. Residents of hell are starving because they cannot reach their mouths with such long handles. Residents of heaven are well fed because they are reaching across the table to feed others while they in turn are fed by others at the table.
What profits a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?
And lyrics from an old song about End Times: “A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold.” If there is no food, your gold ain’t gonna be edible.
Just random unedited stream-of-consciousness.
thank you Vicki Robin for crystalizing the fuzzy thoughts that roam around my brain. I often think we are a bundle of addictions and the mind is a hungry ghost but you brought it home. I’m humbled by this predicament too. You are really a great writer and thinker.
Vicki, you write so well. Articulate and memorable!!!