Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

…we westerners have lost our ancestral knowledge of how to survive on the Earth.  — Chellis Glendinning

The more I delve into the underpinnings of our ecological crisis, the larger, deeper, more profound the picture becomes.  Now I’m reading a book that takes me right back to the original alienation, the one that began when humans separated themselves from nature and started cultivating the land, the one that began with agriculture.

What? Isn’t agriculture all good? Isn’t it how we feed our growing numbers of human beings on the planet?

Source: Wikicommons based on US Census Bureau data

Much has been written about this in past decades, but it is good to remind ourselves – agriculture began driving population growth beginning 10,000 or so years ago, and it began driving the human species’ destruction of the ecology of the planet (Jared Diamond has called it, “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered“).

As populations grew, humans committed more land to agriculture, and then populations grew some more at a rapid rate.  And so on.  Until we arrive at the era of industrial agriculture where we can put all sorts of chemical toxins into the soil, along with human engineered seeds, to coax yet more food out of ever-expanding swaths of ecologically devastated lands to feed ever more people, now totaling 6.8 billion and headed to more than 9 billion in the next 4 decades.

Once we lived sustainably in small numbers in small communities within the balance of the Earth’s eco-communities. With agriculture, we tore down forests, cleared lands, domesticated plants and animals, and became dependent on a form of labor and organization that has led us to our fragmented, overly complex societies in which most of us would not know how to survive if civilization broke down.  We also had to begin preparing defenses so that we could fight to keep our food and income sources, or, worse, go get others’ when we ran out of our own, a driving force of European colonization of the Americas.

Another more current example is oil. The US reached peak oil back in the 70s. As our domestic supply began to dwindle, we had to go get other countries’ oil or ensure our supply from foreign sources, driving an increasingly dangerous, military-oriented foreign policy, which drives the engines of a military industrial complex which is wasting more of the planet, using up enormous amounts of oil and other energy sources, and getting a lot of people killed, but enriching corporations and investors. Imperial overreach, a main source of empire collapses, is all about the need to obtain the energy, including food and other basic supplies, to continue to feed the engines of empire, in this case, industrially and technologically based empire. Petroleum, by the way, is a critical input to chemical fertilizers used in industrial agriculture, as well the the principle fuel used to deliver food from faraway places to your local grocery stores.

Oil reserves - Source: CIA The World Factbook - Wikimedia Commons

Now we read more and more about nations and investors that are aware of looming food crises because we are running out of arable land as a result of agricultural practices, climate change, disappearing water sources because of overuse combined with climate change, and more population growth. So they are buying up land in other countries to try to ensure future access – oh, and by the way, to also make a fortune as arable land and food become more precious commodities in the face of growing shortages (good source of info on this: Food Crisis and the Growing Land Grab). Nothing like planning to make a profit off a future human catastrophe!

Many civilizations have come and gone because of ecological devastation caused by agricultural and consequent economic and military practices, from Romans to Sumerians to Mayans, and we keep proving that we are subject to these same forces, or Laws of Thermodynamics (see the Zine, or, for more info, read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization).

This wasn’t exactly what I intended to write about today, but I am intrigued, fascinated, and deeply unsettled by the book I’m reading right now, My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, by the brilliant ecopsychologist, Chellis Glendinning. It was first published in 1994, and I am thrilled to see it is still in print.  I recommend it highly, even though I am only halfway through.  She provides a great summary background on how the transition from small hunter-gatherer communities to cultivation and sedentism gave rise to exponential population growth, while also creating deeply buried trauma, alienation, disorientation, anxiety, loss of centeredness and identity, and a host of other psychological and social problems from which we all suffer.

I have mentioned the work of ecopsychologists here before because I think their work is crucial if we are to understand our predicament and begin to find a way through the crisis, beyond the ‘end of the world,’ as my book title suggests. To address an alienation that is this deeply rooted, we have to begin to reconstruct our relationship with nature - as in, go out and be in it, observe it, feel your body embedded within it. This will not be an easy journey now because the damage is so great that we will need to muster up a whole lot of courage to face the extent and depth of the loss.

But if we keep protecting ourselves from this experience, we are likely to continue placing false hope in techno-solutions and more engineering of the planet as our path to salvation – the very path that has led us to this crisis. It reminds me of an uncle-in-law who developed a sore throat and then a cough and then laryngitis and then more pain, but refused to go to a doctor – then died a horribly painful throat cancer death.  He was a smoker. There was a truth there too hard for him to face, or a denial that insisted that somehow things would work out okay.

Or he could have faced it and stopped doing the thing that made him sick.  Denial kept him from acting in time.  Denial killed him.

An apt metaphor, no?

This is turning into a longish essay, but here’s what I want to conclude about it.

As much as possible, we need to begin extracting ourselves from industrial society. We have to stop consuming its products and supporting its practices. We need to learn again how to live within the Earth, rather than within an artificially constructed industrial-techno world that is our drug to cover over our pain and our symptoms of deadly disease – disease of the body and spirit.

We need to start building resilient and nurturing communities that cherish and care for their children, spending time within those relationships, talking and sharing and doing creative work together, building little cultures of ecological hope and life.

We need to live radically simply and then start relearning the things we need for real survival - how to raise and cook food, or if we aren’t raising it to support those who do raise real food, healthy nutritious food grown on small-scale farms nearby. We need to learn again how to eat seasonally and organically. We need to learn again how to fix things, how to save and reuse things, how to share tools and expertise in our communities and neighborhoods.

These are the seeds of resilient life that must be created as ‘civilization’ as we have known it begins to break down, victim of the wreckage of its own making.

It’s odd to think about actual planning for an imminent reduction in the entire human footprint on the planet, including rapid decreases in population growth rates, halting the expansion of industrial agriculture and saving those lands that the Earth will need for its own regeneration process, and beginning the deliberate unraveling of industrial society. But it seems to me we don’t have a whole lot of other choices, other than to continue the course that has brought us to this crisis that now stretches across our planet. And we need to do this in community because we also have to learn again to rely on one another, to give one another the safety and personal security we will need in order to go through this transition.

Keep in mind that this must be done with justice. This world can no longer tolerate the kind of wealth generated in recent decades by banks, investors, and multinational corporations. They have gained wealth off the planet’s crisis and the hunger and insecurity of the majority of this planet. No ecological program will work unless the sources of that grossly unjust wealth generation are also dismantled.

The Earth and its abundance ought to be available for the well-being – physical and spiritual – of all beings. That was the goodness of creation from the beginning. It is time for us to go back deep into our psyches and remember the source from which we came.