corimagua

(PART 2)

The Industrial Machine

Retailing analyst Victor Lebow declared shortly after WWII, ” Our enormously productive economy….demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less in order to move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We can’t force the planet to accommodate itself to our insane consumption patterns because our demands are out of this world. I say that quite literally, we would need other planet earths to continue living the way we do. When I say “we” I mean people in the industrialized nations, if all the people in developing nations lived like we do we would surely need a lot more planet Earths to supply all that demand.

This global system in place needs continuous and infinite growth to maintain itself and reducing consumption by slowing down our voracious pace seems unthinkable and unattainable. The insane notion of eternal growth is unsustainable and illogical, nothing in this world can be exempt from the natural cycles of life and death. The only processes that we can rely on forever are cyclical; all linear processes must eventually come to an end. Our civilization rose thanks to cheap abundant energy,trapped under the ground and created over millions of years, but this trapped energy source will run out at some point and therein lies our problem: we became dependent on a finite resource. Our modern way of life and our modern cities are dependent and accustomed to cheap fossil fuels, mainly petroleum. But the very things that gave humanity the chance to thrive and grow at an extraordinary rate are now the very same things which are destroying us. The foundations to our world are built on sand and unless we rebuild and reshape our structures our world will be folded back into the sand.

Changing Our Global System from Unsustainable To Sustainable

We are slowly making the planet a place inhabitable for humanity and if we continue with the toxification of our world we will leave behind a planet inhabited by cockroaches, microbes and bacteria. Earth and life will continue on but humanity will be forced to drop out of the race of life joining the rest of the species who have gone extinct.  We’ve made it so far and we could go so much further, we have so much potential, but we are squandering it all because of greed, the lust for power, and false ideas of progress. Those in power, blinded by their might, are hell-bent on destroying the ecosystem which sustains us. It’s hard to accept these harsh realities, like Chris Hedges said, “To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us”. A gradual change of our ways will surely be better than to crash head-on against the impending doom which lurks over the horizon. I don’t want to live in a world filled with violence and oppression as the powerful fight to secure resources and their wellbeing at the expense of everyone else’s.

We the people are the only ones who can fix this planet out of whack yet most of us could care less about the state of the environment. I understand that most of us are busy with the daily grind of life but we will have to face this problem regardless if we care about it, or know about it. We will not be able to ignore it for much longer and those who don’t care today will be forced to care at some point in the not-so-distant future as the freak weather patterns, the powerful storms, the earthquakes, the floods, the droughts, and the chaos keeps mounting higher and higher. We need to understand that we are fighting for our very survival and we need to wake up and fight before it is too late, no one is exempt form this struggle and we will all have to face the consequences. Sadly some people need to get punched in the face in order to know they are in a fight. I hate to be the one that paints the grim picture, but things are not okay and they will continue to get worse if we fail to act. Our consumption levels keep rising, CO2 levels keep rising, temperatures keep rising. Our crisis is not only environmental, it is also political, economic, spiritual, and as these crisis converge the outcome could be a world totally out of control. It’s the disenfranchised, the poor, the weak, who will first suffer the consequences of a world gone awry but we will all eventually succumb to despair, for all of our grievances are connected. We are truly one species and any injustice, famine, poverty or death, chips away at our humanity and we all suffer the consequences. what will it take to wake us up? Humanity is headed straight over a cliff and instead of changing our course we have accelerated towards it, we continue to fuel our own demise. Why can’t we see the suicidal path we are on? Where do we draw the line and say enough? We can’t afford to keep applying quick fixes. Rather than addressing the symptoms which arise we need to address the real underlaying issues and attempt to eradicate the problem at its source. We need substantial, transformative, systemic changes.

“Up to now, much of the debate over the environment has had the character of monkey chatter amongst the withering leaves of a dying tree–the leaves representing specific, isolated problems… very few of us have been paying attention to the environment’s trunk and branches. They are deteriorating as a result of processes about which there is little or no controversy; and the thousands of individual problems that are the subject of so much debate are, in fact, manifestations of systemic errors that are undermining the foundations of society.”

-Karl-Henrik Robert

Other Thoughts

I don’t think over-population is our major threat but rather the wastes and inefficiencies within our systems. There is enough for everyone on this planet and enough is plenty, like Gandhi said, “the world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” We live in a finite planet, and we have to learn to live within the limits of our world. We are not wiser than nature, and no new technology will save us or grant us free and unlimited energy, that’s not how the Universe works, there is no such thing as a free lunch. I don’t think the answer lies in space either, no matter how much faith you have on astronauts and space colonization, we have an intricate relationship with this one precious blue marble and we need to take care of it. We need to build a unified planet and the Internet gives me hope that a truly global community is attainable.

But in our race to globalize we lost touch with the local community. We need to find ways to organize ourselves more efficiently by reaping the benefits of a globalized world but also developing locally. Like Bill McKibben explained, “Local economies would demand fewer resources and cause less ecological disruption; they would be better able to weather coming shocks; they would allow us to find a better balance between the individual and the community, and hence find extra satisfaction.” By going local we could better provide clean food and water, community and a sense of belonging, education, and most importantly connection and love. I think survival for the Human species lies in small-scale self sustainable communities, but that doesn’t mean we have to live isolated and alone like in the past. We can all be connected through the internet to a globalized world where we could travel and visit other communities freely. It’s still possible to dream.

Like i’ve discussed in other posts, we all can do something to alleviate this problem: We need to learn to Live Simply so that others can Simply live. Our insane levels of consumption are destroying us, they are both environmentally and socially damaging and better lives and a better environment can be found by reducing consumption.

We need to recognize the planet as a living biological entity which provides our nourishment and sustains our health then build a new relationship with its living, breathing, creation system. We need to return to nature. We need to return to the sacred.

“As scientists, many of us have had profound experiences of awe and reverence before the universe. We understand that what is regarded as sacred is more likely to be treated with care and respect. Our planetary home should be so regarded. Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred.”

-Union of Concerned Scientists,

Preserving and Cherishing the Earth: An Appeal for Joint Commitment in Science and Religion

(PART 1)

The timing for this post feels just right due to the latest tragedy in The Phillipines brought upon by Typhoon Haiyan, which by the way, was the largest typhoon to touch down on earth since recorded history. All unsolved issues will re-appear at some point if they are not confronted and resolved. Today, we are confronting the realities of a lack of care for the natural environment and a century of ever increasing exploitation of our finite natural resources. We live inside worlds of our own making, huge cities all over the world that make us marvel at the incredible might and power of humanity and our ability to shape and alter the environment. We created bubbles of human made environments which isolate us from nature with virtual worlds and concrete but this isolation comes at a cost. Our disconnection from the land is taking its toll on humanity and over time we have slowly become estranged from the source of it all. We ignore the fact that we are biological beings made form this earth, and as such, are dependent on clean air and water, on rich and uncontaminated soils, and on the complex and mixed biodiversity that makes up the matrix of life. 

To give a little perspective I’m going to quote James Gustave Speth who in his book The Bridge at the Edge of the World describes in detail the crisis we now face: 

“Half the worlds’s tropical and temperate forests are now gone. The rate of deforestation in the tropics continues at about an acre a second. About half the wetlands and a  third of the mangroves are gone. An estimated 90 percent of the large predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are now overfished or fished to capacity. Twenty percent of the corals are gone, and another 20 percent severely threatened. Species are disappearing at rates about a thousand times faster than normal. The planet has not seen such a spasm of extinction in sixty-five million years, since the dinosaurs disappeared. Over half the agricultural land in drier regions suffers from some degree of deterioration and desertification. Persistent toxic chemicals can now be found by the dozens in essentially each and every one of us….. Everywhere earth’s ice fields are melting.There are over two hundred dead zones in the ocean due to over fertilization. Freshwater withdrawals doubled globally between 1960 and 2000, and are now over half of accessible runoff. The following rivers no longer reach the oceans in the dry season: the Colorado, Yellow, Ganges, and Nile, among others.”

But despite these harsh realities we madly drive on ignoring all the warning signals and ignoring the voices of those throughout the world who have been telling us for ages that the planet is alive and we are slowly destroying it. We forget that our current civilization is only about a couple hundred years old and while it has provided great things for humanity maybe this isn’t the best way, and it is certainly not the only way to do things. Maybe industrial civilization can become sustainable, which I think is unlikely, but one thing is for certain; we can no longer afford to continue with “business as usual”, we need radical change. If we wish to avoid calamity and chaos, we need fundamental changes to our world. We stand at a critical point, or like the great Carl Sagan said “a branch point”, in history. What we do today will have huge impacts on the future of our species. How we decide to respond to our current crisis will mean everything. We have several options: We can fall into resignation and think all is lost, we can join the religious and say to ourselves that everything is in god’s hands, we can join the deniers and think there is no problem to deal with, we can join those who think that everything will be alright somehow if we just muddle through our issues, we can join those who want to pass the puck along and deflect the problems to future generations or to those who live in parts of the world most affected by climate change. Or, you can join the solutionists who think that our problems can be fixed and that answers can and must be found. We each have the power, individually and collectively, to change the world and our generation can transform this planet. Be courageous and have heart because we might be our species last opportunity to change and adapt before it becomes another failed evolutionary attempt and our passage through the wonderful miracle of life is discontinued. To make this change happen it’s essential that we re-connect with nature and re-learn to cherish life, all life, for the gift that it truly is. We have to come to the realization that the planet is not a dead rock floating through space, but rather a living biological entity, just like you and I, and our survival is dependent on it.

We Are The Earth

Human beings, along with all other living organisms who have evolved through time, are dependent on this planet for survival. We were born from the Earth and Its the planet that breeds people not the other way around. We are not born into the world, we are born out of the world and recognizing this subtle change in the use of language can makes a world’s difference. We have to stop treating the planet like we are not a part of it. We have forgotten where our food, air and water comes from. We don’t pay attention to the destination of our garbage and waste. There is no question that human beings hold a special purpose in planet earth. I think there is a reason we are the dominant species and have evolved further than all other life forms. We have thinking brains which grant us the capacity to imagine and create, to project our thoughts and to shape and influence the physical world, altering reality. Maybe our sole purpose and the reason we were granted dominion over the earth was so we could nurture and protect life, the single greatest miracle in the universe and the reason for it all. I don’t think we were put here just to consume, treating the planet like a buffet restaurant for us to feast off of eternally, continually feeding our pleasures and vices. Sometimes we forget that as a species we hold huge amounts of power and our might is such that our actions have an effect on the entire environment of our planet. All things on Earth are interconnected and our actions have consequences that ripple through the systems which we are a part off. This entails a great sense of responsibility and we must be much more careful given the amount of power we have. “With great power comes great responsibility” and if SpiderMan grew into this understanding so could we.

“The stars, Earth, stones, life of all kinds, form a whole in relation to each other and so close is this relationship that we cannot understand a stone without some understanding of the great sun. No matter what we touch, an atom or a cell, we cannot explain it without knowledge of the universe. The laws governing the universe can be made interesting and wonderful to children, more interesting than things in themselves, and they begin to ask: What am I? What is the task of humanity in this wonderful universe?

-Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential