One round world sharing one big mess
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
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In our last post we reflected on what it means to be part of one round finite world, a beautiful globe that we share with 6.8 billion people and millions of other species, and then the habitat in which all that teeming life is embedded.
The other side of that reflection is how we all share in the planet’s deteriorating condition. Even if we don’t all want to be one, we are one, like it or not. We are one ecologically. That is a biological truth as much as it is increasingly an economic truth. Globalizing industrial society has accelerated this process of the planet’s deterioration and our bondedness in the consequences of that deterioration.
A couple examples:
China air pollution - NASA photo
Pollution blown across the entire North Pacific from the smokestacks of Asia’s industrial belt is responsible for worsening air quality in the western United States, researchers say.
This story appeared in last week’s update from Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet, a favorite website here. The study was reported in the journal Nature and revealed that:
…springtime ozone levels 2 to 5 miles above the surface have risen by 29 percent as Asia’s heavy industry has expanded sharply between 1984 and 2008. Such a surge could only be accounted for by pollutants from Asia that are converted to ozone and carried to North America by strong and prevailing westerly winds…
So, you know, good luck with your pollution control policies out West.
Another example, this story from Wednesday’s NY Times, Courts emerging as battlefield for fights over climate change.
Kivalina is an Inupiat Eskimo village off the coast of Alaska that is being chewed up by the Arctic Sea. Until recent years, the Arctic’s ice blocks protected the coast. Now global warming is drastically reducing the annual ice formation allowing winter storm waves and high winds to rip chunks of coast away from the island. It has also disrupted fishing and hunting patterns that are at the heart of the villagers’ survival. [If you don't see the video, click here]:
Now the people of the village are taking an amazing step: they are suing ExxonMobil, Shell Oil and other fossil fuel corporations for causing the warming that is destroying their community and way of life. Since they are being forced to relocate at an estimated cost of $400 million, they would like those who caused this disaster to pay for it.
You see how we are all connected. After all, who are the customers of these companies? And while we can excoriate ourselves once again for driving our cars, I want to remind us that that is but one small part of our oil use. This disaster also comes from manufacture of all our plastics – our plastic bags and bottles – all that long-distance transportation of products, including food, to our stores, enormous amounts of oil used in the propagation of war, military training, and military manufacture, running factories to produce disposable goods, the pesticides and chemical fertilizers used in our enormous-scale industrial agriculture, and on and on.
Kivalina - Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library
In other words, oil companies, yes, at the service of our whole way of life, national security, empire, and more. In other words, we are all responsible for Kivalina. And while it is fine to recycle plastic bottles and bags, they should not be made in the first place. While it is fine to eat, our diets should not support industrial agriculture. While it is fine to buy a Prius (if you are rich enough to afford one), that does not exempt us from responsibility to take political action to change the very basis of an economy and way of life that is destroying Kivalina and a host of other communities all around the world.
The “we are one” mantra is not some romantic spiritual notion; it is a radical call to open our eyes to what is actually taking place all around us in this one round world, everything interconnected and working together – for good or for harm.
Galileo Earth-Moon flyby - NASA/JPL
But when I speak of political action, I do not mean to wait for political parties to do something – I mean all of us taking part in creating a radically new way of life, one that accepts responsibility for the harm that has been done, seeks to quickly reduce the amount of further damage, works to alter the whole political culture around a project based on allowing the planet’s ecosystems to begin to return to health, to regenerate (as the earth will do, you can actually trust that), and end this adolescent state of denial about our place within the fabric of the whole.
We write this over and over:
if we keep tearing away at the fabric of this planet’s eco-community, keep pulling out the threads that hold it together, it will not be able to carry life as we know it, and you can be sure it won’t be able to hold this human species, built as it now is upon the dead heavy weight of this industrial and post-industrial growth economy.
We see out west how we cannot be small, selfish, or national anymore. What happens in China affects the air we breathe because the planet is one round world and air flows around that one round world. And global warming impacts us all; our burning of fossil fuels is tearing apart the island community of Kivalina.
The species is in trouble. We are poisoning and destroying one another. Only a global view will help us learn how to live in the truth of the whole within the one round finite world that is our home. At the same time, only a return to life at the most local and simplest will allow that whole to remain intact.
February 16th, 2010 at 9:31 am
Please recall the wonderful quotation by Joseph Campbell,
“When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”
Let us imagine (in full agreement with Joseph Campbell) that “our job is to straighten out our own lives” and that it is precisely the unsustainable ways we are living out our lives in this wondrous planetary home we inhabit which is inducing the formidable global challenges now looming so ominously before all of us on the horizon. Consider that human beings are the primary cause of certain converging ecological threats the children could confront in the future.
In all the discussions I can recall about “the human predicament” never have I heard the idea presented that human beings cannot resolve problems which we are responsible for creating. We are not asked to change a world which is perfect, but to make changes in unsustainable patterns of behavior that are within our control. The mastery that gave rise to the global challenges to human wellbeing and environmental health is the same mastery that can be deployed in responding ably to those challenges. If conspicuous per-capita overconsumption and extravagant hoarding of limited resources; rampant overproduction of virtual mountains of unnecessary stuff; and unbridled overpopulation activities by the human species, when taken together, are “producing” threats to humanity, Earth and its environs, then sensibly changing these ways of behaving will mitigate and eventually resolve our plight. Is there any reason to doubt that human beings can alleviate any plight human beings can produce? Our task is to adequately deploy gifts God has given humankind to acknowledge, accept, address and overcome the human-induced challenges before us.
By choosing necessary changes in our behavioral repertoire (in the sense of willing the inevitable), the family of humanity will find its way through the human-driven mess we have made in this world (not of this world) which is the perfect creation of God, I suppose.
February 16th, 2010 at 10:08 am
I guess how much I agree with Campbell would rest with how much he is speaking of the individual or the species. Individuals can try to fix their own individual messes as much as they like, but unless we begin to deal with the mess that civilization has made, nothing essential will change in terms of the ecological crises we face.
There is a collective fixing of the mess we have made that is required now, as you have been describing for a long time. We stepped out of our place within nature and then thought we had the power to manipulate it to our liking, to exercise our ‘mastery,’ as you might say. That worked for a while but always had within it the logic of its own destruction – and ours.
What Campbell does suggest is that creation is a tumultuous thing. We want it ordered to our comfort and convenience, but it ain’t always comfortable or convenient (as people in DC might attest just now). In fact, creation remains a tumultuous thing – always has been and always will be.
The point being, I guess, to learn a little humility, to let go the need to control, and to get ourselves back into the beautiful balance of nature, and then let it unfold as it will, in all its messiness.
February 18th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
On “the need to learn a little humility” fast.
Please assist me, Margaret. Our species has given itself the name “Homo sapiens sapiens”.
In light of the deplorable, human-induced state of our planetary home as well as all of the unfinished work we have immediately ahead of us in order to begin accomplishing the many things that some of our brightest and best say “matter most” for the future of life on Earth, are we justified by reason or common sense in naming ourselves as we have or is this way of identifying ourselves a misleading moniker of a sort that reveals more about human hubris than it says about human intelligence, much less our possessed wisdom?
Would the name “Homo hubris hubris” be more accurate?
February 18th, 2010 at 12:40 pm
I guess what I would say in response, Steve, is that there are many examples of the species Homo sapiens sapiens who are worthy of the moniker. I also think that we are at a turning point in the evolution of the ‘sapiens’ part of us. We have worshiped the mind and our technological control for a long time now, and this unbalanced way of being alive is arriving at its inevitable crisis.
In response, some people are engaged in profound seeking, letting go, rediscovering the meaning of the human and our place within the fabric of life. They are engaged in processes of profound transformation, personally, spiritually, socially, to make way for the next breakthrough in consciousness, in evolution, even though that breakthrough will be catapulted forwarded by the crisis of our making.
Many others are responding by trying everything they can possibly think of to hold on to “I think therefore I am,” to control the outcome in favor of their familiar world, especially if they are among those who live so comfortably and lavishly within that old world framework.
There are examples of profound Homo hubris hubris to be sure, and examples of profound Homo sapiens ‘sapiens.’ One welcomes the transition, the other resists it like crazy.
In the long term, and even though we may have hell to go through to get there, I’m placing my bets on the ‘sapiens.’