Is going green breaking up families?
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I asked my niece what I should write about today. The choices were: more Haiti, Asian Carp DNA in Lake Michigan (thanks Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Illinois), kids altering the functioning of their brains by being wired and online an average 7-8 hours a day, or…
Therapists reporting that families are beginning to suffer tensions over how green to be, how much their lives will be impacted by efforts to conserve, reduce consumption, make serious efforts to ‘save’ the planet.
The latter issue caught her attention, so here is what caught my attention in the NY Times on Monday:
Preserving the Planet, Straining the Relationship
In the actual newspaper, the subheading under that title read: “Therapists report seeing an increase in household disputes over just how green to go.”
Call me crazy, but I think this good news. Not the fights themselves, of course, but what this indicates. I had no idea that our new planetary consciousness — that there are limits and we have surpassed them, that the planet is magnificent and we are bringing about its diminishment – that this consciousness was becoming so mainstream and widespread that it was causing family feuds.
You see, I don’t think we know real change is happening until these tensions begin to manifest themselves. Imagine whites in the south when it was clear that the era of segregation laws was coming to an end. We know how that went – and then segregation ended in any case (a contributing factor being those southern whites who embraced the civil rights struggle, those ready for the change to occur).
In the years of my work in the Central America solidarity movement (see my bio), I saw something similar. One family member would go down to the war zones and refugee camps and have a life-changing experience. They would come back altered, come back into their own more affluent life and see it and the whole US culture of comfort and excess with a new lens, from a new vantage point. I know some marriages that were severely strained by such things.
(c) Why I do this work
On the other hand, you can hardly imagine what it would mean for a family to work through something like this and how it could create unbelievable new bonds now strengthened by a commitment to live differently in the world. Some of these relationships became more profound than before. Whole families went through changes like these.
I was thinking of this, too, while watching CNN interview two 8-yr-old boys, best friends, whose parents sat them down to tell them about what was going on in Haiti, and how they responded by setting up a sidewalk stand to sell hot chocolate. They raised some $1,300 that day, and I’m going to bet that those little guys will be forever marked by that experience.
So, families, partners in life, friends, communities — struggle away with this. Discuss the lifestyle issues vigorously. Vent feelings (as long as you can do this in a respectful and safe personal environment), express fears, sadness, frustrations, changed expectations about your life. If you are a family with children, include them, please. I meet kids all the time who are scared to death about the future. Reassure them by showing them the possibilities of change – first in your own lives – so that they can have hope that all hell will not break lose in their lifetime.
Now, there is a relatively new field called Ecopsychology from which I have learned a great deal. For way too long, we have treated the human psyche as if it were detached from its ecology, from the eco-community in which it is embedded. We have a relationship with nature, and it is profound and intimate. Restoring our experience of that relationship is key to learning to live differently on the planet and to becoming fully human.
Here’s a site where you can explore some of this thinking: International Community for Ecopsychology. And if you ever want to work on this stuff with your loved ones, be sure you find a ‘therapist’ (don’t like the word much) with a sensitivity to these things. It could make a huge difference in how you come to terms with these necessary lifestyle issues.
Finally, a plug for one of the other topics on today’s list – the extent to which our kids are wired into technology, online, constant stimulation, texting, disembodied communication at breakneck speed – 7-8 hours per day on average. If you haven’t heard of this study yet, here’s a link to the NY Times article. And this AP article from 2008 should be required reading for every parent: Technology May Be Altering How Brains Work.
So, while you’re having these family conversations, invite your kids to turn off the gadgets, go offline for a little while, and get acquainted with the natural world and how their bodies are involved in that world. Otherwise, I fear that we will create a generation that does not have a clue how to save itself from pending ecological disasters, will not have the most basic tools (including having a long thought or a long in-person conversation) to get through the upheavals that will certainly be a part of their generation.
“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said one teenager about all the media to which he is endlessly hooked up. Oh goodness, please, open your eyes to your world, the real one out here. Do you know how beautiful it is? Do you know what’s happening to it? If you don’t know, how will you know how to save yourself and your generation from the consequences of its degradation? How will you know what it means to be human in time to reclaim, heal, and renew the space in which the human became possible?
Pacific Coast Highway - Photo: Margaret Swedish
January 29th, 2010 at 8:00 am
It appears to me as if one certain thing humanity cannot keep doing much longer is the very same thing we are so adamantly and foolishly doing now as the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us choose to recklessly speed up the ever increasing, seemingly endless growth of the global economy as well as to deceptively manipulate human beings into going along with a conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and unreserved overpopulation agenda.
If we keep doing what we are doing now and the human community keeps getting what it is getting now, I fear that sooner rather than later everything we are led to believe we are protecting and preserving will be ruined. In the not-too-distant future a distinct probability could exist that one of two colossal calamities will occur. The wanton dissipation of Earth’s limited resources, the relentless degradation of Earth’s frangible environment, and the approaching destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by the human species, when taken together, appear to be proceeding toward the precipitation of a catastrophic ecological wreckage of some unimaginable sort unless, of course, the world’s ever expanding, artificially designed, manmade global political economy (the modern “economic colossus”) continues to speed headlong toward the monolithic ‘wall’ called “unsustainability” at which point humanity’s runaway economy crashes before Earth’s ecology is collapsed.
Could we talk about the need for a new vision for life on Earth?
Months ago Andy Revkin of the NYTimes and the Dot Earth community asked the question, “What does humanity do when we grow up?” Dr. Joel Cohen has explained elsewhere how humanity is currently in an adolescent phase of its development and is moving toward maturity. Other experts have suggested that the behavior of people in many places is even more primitive, in the sense of being less grown-up than adolescents and more nearly infantile.
Perhaps another way of coming up with a new vision would be to ask the question, “What might a human world look like when full grown, mature human beings with feet of clay design, construct and organize a new world order in the future?”
January 29th, 2010 at 8:14 am
Could we talk about the need for a new vision…? Indeed, we MUST talk about that. And then we have to talk about a path to get us there. Articulating the vision, looking at the current crisis in that context, and then charting a course out of crisis towards that vision, is the vocation of this and the next few generations.
Could restore meaning to life, the kind that technology and consumption of stuff cannot give us.
February 10th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
With the realization that the very survival of humankind and life as we know it could be put at risk soon, somehow we have to find ways and means of engaging one another and the broader human family in discussions like this one that at least provide an opportunity to reasonably and sensibly connect the unsustainability of global overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species with the ecological realities of the finite and frangible planet we inhabit. One way or another, we have to find the means of opening the way for ideas, policies and programs that lead us to “sustainable progress” and to effective designs for practicable business enterprises as well as for the construction of viable human communities in our planetary home.