ecospirit

There's a star-sized hole in the snow balanced on my deck railing, but you can only see it from one angle. We look for the star during this season, especially this year, with CoP-15 concurrent with Solstice and Advent. Amidst the post-Copenhagen spin, there is a smallish star, when looked at from the angle of climate diplomacy, namely the little non-binding agreement that Obama brokered in an accidental context, a coda to the exhausting proceedings.

But we look for Big Things during Advent, a guiding star that is unmistakable And the summit did not bring this from the world leaders. However, the mass movement generated by a significant portion of the world population through the organizing efforts of 350.org, Avaaz, and other groups was the real star of the season, starting with the Oct 24 rallies, on through the vigils Dec 12 and the mass petition signed by 12 million, tens of thousands of whose names were read aloud in the conference hall, the Bella Center. The only reason that many of us are not in despair right now is that this movement is primed to grow, keeping the pressure up for a “real deal.” The climate justice movement provides a genuine counterweight to the Tea Party movement in the US and the neo-Nazis in Europe.

President Obama, after his feat of extraordinary diplomacy, barging in on a cabal of developing nations plotting against the US and turning it into a collaborative session, albeit too late to significantly alter this much-ballyhooed summit, declared that what we need most as a global community of nations is trust. Both in the halls of international summitry and within the D.C. Beltway, trust is the missing ingredient, even though we all have interests that are more common and vital than national, sectarian, or party. Without it, nothing important can be accomplished as a nation or as a world community.

That is why the international quality of the climate change movement gives some grounds for hope. In terms of the politics of a climate treaty, there is far more hope in Europe, the UK, Japan, even Russia, because virtually all parties recognize and accept the science of climate change, and therefore the urgency of abating it. In the US, party and ideological divisions are rendering intelligent conversation on the issue extremely difficult. A key indicator of the difficulty is that the co-sponsor of the first climate bill, John McCain, has not shown any willingness to support the bill presently clogged in the Senate. It is more important for his party to wreck Obama's presidency than to save civilization as we know it.

This must change. Our main hope, now that our leaders have failed us, is to build an unstoppable people's movement that must be heard. Last Thursday, a day before the climate summit ended, 350.org called for a worldwide fast in support of a “real deal.” We will need more, longer fasts, and acts of civil disobedience. Everything will need to be disciplined and well-organized. The targets of these acts of conscience in this country are US Senators, who hold the key to our country's seriously joining a just, meaningful, and binding climate treaty. The Congress as a whole must come up with a bill for the President to sign, but it is the Senate that must ratify a UN treaty, by a two-thirds vote. Electing Obama was not the political act of the era; winning that treaty vote for the planet will be.

So, on to Mexico City without faltering. And start preparing now for your own role in the treaty vote in the Senate. The fate of the Earth depends upon it.

Labels: 350.org, Avaaz. Tea Party. John McCain, COP-15, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Obama

Saturday, December 19

That was how I entitled a discussion group post the eve of the climate summit in Copenhagen. The next day, I broke six weeks' silence at Meeting with ministry on a haunting Gaelic carol, Christ often comes in the stranger's guise, reminding Friends that, in the climate emergency, it is the poor and island countries who are the stranger at the table. They were indeed present at the table in Copenhagen, but were lucky to get even crumbs from the repast. If Copenhagen has proved the impotence of our international political system, what are we to make of Solstice 2009, and the hope of Advent?

Yesterday, as the COP-15 talks concluded in a whirlwind of desperate diplomacy, I went for a walk with my wife Geeta in the fresh deep snow of our drive. Hemlocks, pines, and rhodos hung low, heavy with snow. Mirroring Copenhagen coming up with so little, the forest seemed to bow, draped in sympathy with the colossal failure of the international political system. It reinforced my deep sadness.

I mentioned this to Geeta, and she laughed, recognizing the pathetic fallacy. But I went deeper than sympathetic magic, recognizing that they are bowing to the Earth. The earth and all her myriad creation, yes, but also honoring her as natura naturans, the infinitely creative matrix of life. Gaia may well be in mourning as the deepest of Solstice nights approached, but she still retains the miraculous power to produce new life-forms.

Then, last night, as I played a variety of seasonal music, marking the whole scope of the seaon, I felt a deep sweetness, surrounded by darkness marked by white tree-sentinels. This was indeed a pivotal Solstice for humanity, and we may now be heading towards climate disaster. If so, I remind readers that emotionally, it is the same as facing personal death within a web of family. Experiencing the “last time” with our loved ones is both immensely sad, and for some, fearful, but at the same time it can be sweet, harvesting the richness and depth we have created through faithful relationships.

So I cherish each little bird I hear singing, rather than remembering when there were more. I admire the grace and beauty of the deer who eat my garden. I delight in the constant number of chattering, busy squirrels, still fed by our stand of hickories in a Southern Appalachian forest that remains, for a while longer, oak-hickory.

If you know your family well, but not the earth-place that gives you a home, then by all means, get to know that place while it still has some integrity. Even if we are headed into a downward spiral, there is so much to cherish.

And as the brave folks at 350.org remind us all today, through we lost a big battle yesterday, the war for climate justice goes on, and the cadre of climate warriors could welcome a boost. But first, gather 'round with those you love, get outside despite the weather and greet your earth-place and its denizens. Enjoy a sabbath. Then, with the New Year, be ready to bring it on again, and that's going to mean holding Congress to the task of passing climate and energy legislation worthy of the science and faithful to the cause of climate justice.

This is obviously no mean task, but when you come to the end of the road, will you look back and see that you were too preoccupied with your own comfort to join the biggest moral campaign in history? Weakened by a rebellious Congress, our political savior had no prophetic rallying cry, only scrappy diplomacy to round up some key developing nations, promising to do more next time. The real heroes at Copenhagen were the little countires who wouldn't fold on the rack of pressure, and the people in the streets, including all the NGO's progressively ousted from the negotiating hall, massing outside as the summit headed into virtual deadlock. Our leaders have failed us; now leadership needs to come from the people.

It's our turn to lead, friends, each in ways that we never dreamed we could. The courage and creativity are all there, if only we have the faith to dig for it.

Labels: 350.org, Advent, COP-15, Copenhagen, natura naturans, oak-hickory forest, Solstice

December 11 we vigiled around the Burnsville Square with our sign, “350= Climate Justice!” Three of us from Celo Friends Meeting were joined by a retired couple from Atlanta, sojourning at the Episcopal church in town. We were barely noticed, except when we stood under the “Go Cougars” sign. The same night, the Mountain Heritage high school football team was playing in Chapel Hill for the state 2A championship. It was very cold, and all got frosty fingers and toes. We walked around the square several times, turning our sign towards passing motorists. A woman walked across the crosswalk and gave us a quick, warm smile. There were no jeers, but also no inquiries or thumbs up. The only one among us born in the county was the gentleman from St Thomas, and he was impressed simply by the fact that such a vigil was possible in the town where he grew up. We vigiled until dark, the sky turning from deep blue to charcoal.

This was Friday night. On Sunday, Jim, one of the vigilers, brought a bell which we passed around at the close of Meeting, each person ringing it twenty times, until the number 350 was reached. (350 ppm CO2 is the upper limit climate scientists agree the earth can absorb and maintain anything like the world we grew up in. The present concentration of CO2 is 390.) Answering the call of 350.org and the World Council of Churches, bells tolled 350 times around the world, calling the negotiaters and climate ministers to climate justice via the treaty being negotiated in Copenhagen. A Baptist minister, shepherd of the church on the square, had first answered that they'd ring the bells 350 times Sunday afternoon, but he failed to respond to my calls for confirmation during the preceding week. Most people in Yancey county don't accept climate change, and so this proclamation was probably too risky for him.

For whom do these bells toll? First, they toll for the nations most at risk, the island nations, nations like Bangladesh with low coastlines, the African nations being pushed more and more irrevocably into drought. These are the countries providing leadership at the conference, courageously standing up to the industrial powers who have used strong-arm tactics against them in each of the negotiating sessions prior to COP-15. Meanwhile, the US and China carry on a diplomatic duel, pointing fingers at each other over responsibility for the mess. The EU has continued to provide leadership of its own, both promising the most cuts in CO2 emissions and the most money to help poorer nations pay the costs of shifting to lower carbon energy economies. Russia and Japan have also promised fairly deep cuts by 2020. But these levels remain insufficient, and as the climate summit heads into its final days, the rich and poor nations, and the US and China, remain deadlocked. Heads of state have started arriving and giving speeches ahead of the final scramble for a treaty framework. Gordon Brown, the British PM, arrived early, trying to help the poor nations and NGO's, (the latter being progressively excluded from the final sessions) broker a deal with the rich countires who have caused most of the pollution.

For whom do these bells toll? The poorer nations are clearly most at risk from climate change. But the bells toll not only for them, but for all nations, for rising seas and changing weather patterns will affect all, if not now, soon. Climate change has begun, and is picking up speed. Only a few years ago, scientists worried that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2070. Now a credible study by the US Navy points to five-seven years. And they have tolled already in New Orleans, where the poor either died, hang on with scant help or have become some of the earliest climate refugees.

Negotiating a treaty that will lay out a pathway towards climate justice will be difficult, close to impossible. The divides at COP-15 are many and deep, especially those between the developed and developing worlds, and the US and China. The key problem is the clash between politics and the laws of nature. Climate science reveals a narrowing window for action and a steepening curve for the costs of stabilizing and eventually cutting back carbon emissions. These costs, politically and economically, are enormous, verging on the astronomical as the window for action closes. Since we are dealing with tipping points for a whole interlocking series of positive feedback loops, what the Brits call “add-on effects,” it's not something we can fix after we are dead certain these effects have been unleashed. Some have already, yet denial allows many to enjoy “normal”life for a short while. We are a remarkably resilient species, and the mind is especiallly pliable, entertaining multiple fantasies of escape and salvation, either by technology or divine intervention. But as we sleepwalk like lemmings towards the rising seas, the Four Horsemen have already entered the field, swords and scythes upraised.

Concurrent with COP-15, the Parliament of World Religions has convened in Melbourne. I attended the last one in Barcelona in 2004, trying to get the religions of the world to accept anthropogenic climate instability as the chief moral issue of our times. Gary Gardner, the religion editor for Worldwatch, and I announced a meeting for those who agreed. One Spanish priest showed. Another meeting, held in Gaudi's storied la Pedrera, replete with wonderful speakers and multilingual translators, was attended by less than 50. A friend who was with me at Barcelona is attending, and says that religious leaders are very focused this time on the primacy of climate as a moral issue. A Christian pastor, he assured me this fall that “God will not let us fail..” Yesterday he wrote that things were looking pretty bleak for a new climate treaty, adding that he was holding out for a miracle.

All of us are praying for that miracle at Copenhagen, including some atheists trying new behavior. The miracle would be a fair, scientifically honest, binding treaty that builds on Kyoto and includes the US, China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia as signatories, as well as the 37 nations bound by emissions reductions in the Kyoto Accord. The bells are tolling, not just for rich and poor, but for the amphibians, the birds, and the mammals, including our species: all higher life on this remarkably blessed planet.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do...

Friends, what have we done? Can it still be undone?

Labels: 350, Arctic melt, climate justice, COP-15, Parliament of World Religions

When we were in Costa Rica last year, we visited an inspiring community adjacent to the Parc National La Amistad, which straddles the Talamanca Range forming a backbone running from Costa Rica through northern Panama. The founders wanted to protect the park from encroachment by neighboring farmers who wanted more land for pasture by setting up a buffer and monitoring it. Indeed, the first evening we were at Durika, one of the residents showed us the fires burning across the valley, climbing up several facing ridges. The man shook his head, mourning the continuing loss of rainforest to cattle. There are only 6 rangers for the entire park, which is huge (give acreage). So, after years of planning and pooling funds, the Durika folks purchased 8500 hectares bordering the park. Their plan, now into its 18th year, was to build a self-sustaining community and host eco-tourists. Guided tours of the park would both provide education and give the community members the opportunity to patrol their end of the park via walkie-talkies, providing a supplementary presence for the rangers.

Durika's plan is working. A community of 20-25 makes a living there, growing fruit and vegetables, with a sizable goat operation which porduces yogurt and cheese. They trade fruit for beans grown by their indigenous neighbors, and receive rice from a farming partner who lives about 100 km away. The income from ecotourists goes primarily towards Durika's monthly land payments. Available food goes to the guests first; what remains is equitably distributed to the individuals and families who make up the community: so much for each adult, so much for each child. They have not missed a payment, and the members are strong and lean, but not malnourished. Financial resources are pooled, but each member has a modest yearly personal allowance.

The bunkhouses where we stayed are spartan, but there is plenty of running water and electricity, which both come from a generously flowing stream with an impressive fall, issuing from the mountain slopes above the community. (GUY who designed it). Hydropower is a major source of electricity in Costa Rica, which only requires fossil fuels for 10% of the total. The community was hosting a solar power workshop the day we left, and the American leadig it told us that the main plan was to provides power for the indigenous school on adjacent land that operates minimally for lack of electricity.

Schooling at Durika is Montessori-style through eighth grade. The high schoolers have tutoring to help them pass qualifying tests for college. We met several kids, ranging from infants to age 16. They were well-adjusted, bright, and knew how to take care of themselves while backpacking. They had a sense of independence and fun. The Montessori teacher was a man in his seventies who had just decided to retire and work full-time with the goats. A woman in her late twenties was taking over the position.

Though they hope that the children will return to the community after college, Durikans are senstive to the huge differences between their way of life and the urban life that their kids might one day join. So, every year, they take a field trip to the favelas and bordellos, interviewing prostitutes and druggies. (As a retired humanities teacher, I see a great opportunity for a journaling assignment!) One of the most impressive members we met was a self-described “party-girl” who had come to Durika to kick her alcohol habit, then undergone a year's trial membership, then welcomed into membership by consensus. She is a perfect example of the kind of initiation that I described the need for in my last post. It was clear that she lived an integrated life with meaning and purpose, whereas she was on the brink of disaster before she discovered Durika. It is she who will be the new lead Montessori teacher.

Durika is very tight-knit, as you can imagine. They hold a community meeting every night after dinner, which includes everyone still awake. These are open to everything possible affecting the life of the community, and can be alternately intense, business-like or humorous. This is a family, and even the divorced couple who live separately but continue to co-parent treat each other with respect and affection, like brother and sister.

Like any community, there are problems, both interpersonal and structural. Right now, there is not enough housing for everyone who needs it, and building goes slowly when you have to raise the money and the crew have other daily responsibilities. I detected some tension between those who had nothing except what the community gave them, and those who seemed to have other sources of income (there is no requirement to hand over your bank account). In terms of food sustainability, they still import wheat, and I wondered why they didnt grow corn. We discussed potatoes and setting up a mill for potato flour, but this does not seem imminent. The farmer who donates the rice is a key to their survival, as is their voluntary submission to food rationing. I learned elsewhere of a family who left after nine months, since they had all lost weight, the father and mother 30 and 20 pounds respectively.

But that's where we're headed as a civilization, and if you're gonna survive, it means lean and mean. Durika is really pointing the way. In a world of decline and collapse, none of us, including farming communities, is going to be “self-sufficient.” Community is something that will need to transcend immediate locality, though the ability to ship gargantuan volumes of material long distances will soon disappear, due to peak oil. If you have a story of community, or meaningful intitiation back into indigenous life-styles, please respond with comments and links. We are all in this together.

There's something decidedly twenty-first century about an inventor telling us that technology is about to make us into God. This would be the final realization of the line in Genesis, ye shall be as gods. The emphasis there was on our stepping across the line into moral choice, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. No more trusting obedience to the ordering principle of life in the Garden. But post-Eden, tending the Garden became our neolithic charge. We need to stop short of the God-equation, and go back to living within our niche, if that still has any meaning at all.

Let's face it, those who are not techno-hip, or not saved, will have a time of it. The stark limit of biological evolution is population overshoot, not conscious control of the inner springs of life and consciousness (though there will always be a tiny handful who achieve this state, as the yogins of India have shown for at least four and a half millennia). We crossed that line ca. 1986, when we pushed the earth beyond 100% bio-capacity. And that was before the rise of China and India, with a third of planetary population.

Since Kyoto, carbon emissions have gone up, not down, and the curve has steepened since China's big push. The faint hopes of a climate treaty (not in Copenhagen, alas, but “sometime” next year), rest on getting the nations of the world to play by corporate rules, agreeing to commoditize carbon, allowing market manipulators to distort the process to the degree that the goal is effectively subverted. A real integration of science and economics can only reasonably come from a clear-cut carbon tax, with subsidies to the industrial poor to offset it. But that is off the table. We can deny the ensuing rolling collapse, which is the response of the vast majority of humanity - including almost all my colleagues, friends and family- or meet it as an existential challenge.

In Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, Carolyn Baker argues that we listen to the still small voice and recognize the process of industrial civilization’s collapse, making it an opportunity for initiation for those of us who survive. Baker, following Dmitri Orlov, says this process has already started, and the challenge is no longer economic or technological fixes, but spiritual transformation. I have long argued that the global ecological crisis is the greatest moral challenge in human history. Baker and other “Doomers” proclaim that we have already failed that challenge, which leads to the next, crossing the archipelago back into our still–waiting indigenous selves.

Many wise people have argued that this has been the challenge for our species ever since we left the Garden of hunting and gathering. I’ve always loved Jung’s term , the “two million year-old Great Man.” This is the type of the human, the creature who knew how to inhabit its niche, wherever its ancestors happened to live. Now that the late industrial is fast becoming the post-industrial, the long repressed cry for elders is beginning to find voice, and suburbians travel to deserts or mountain fastnesses to walk further than they’ve ever walked before, fast intensely, and pray as deeply as they can, seeking the blessed Grail of initiation into deeper, more meaningful lives than consumerism and jetting to adventurelands for “cultural enrichment” could ever provide.

At an earlier climate conference,1992 in Rio, George Bush Sr proclaimed, “The American way of life is unnegotiable.” Baker's analysis of this kind of thinking (she attributes the original quote to Cheney) is that it reveals the underlying psychology of industrial capitalism: the developmental stage of a 2-year old, “believing that there are no limits and we can have whatever we want.” Not only can, but should. My own sense that democracy operates at the level of a young adolescent is trumped here by an even deeper analysis, reminiscent of Paul Shepard's critique of industrial society acting to juvenilize nature.

But let’s face it, there aren’t many initiators out there. The remaining treasures are the remnant of archaic men and women who know how to live in place within what remains of their tattered ecosystems. The far-sighted and courageous among the dominant industrial culture are training themselves to learn to live again in place, thus to become indigenous once again. But the key, as Baker, Bill Plotkin, Maladoma Some, and Michael Murphy all proclaim, is that our type, morphologically, genotypically and spiritually, still lives deep within us, accessible to anyone with full awareness of what is needed in our desperate times. Whether accession leads to initiation into an integrated, empowered adult in touch with the Great Man (or Woman) who can live in the ruins of the Petroleum Interval is another matter. It is my challenge and yours, dear reader.

Next up: a community providing a courageous example of embracing the challenge of becoming indigenous: Durika, in Costa Rica.

Labels: collapse, Dmitri Orlov, Great Man, indigenous selves, initiation, juvenilization, Paul Shepard, Sacred Demise

Though the millennium has passed, and we’re still here, an apocalyptic mood remains. Small wonder. We are in a global recession, the worst since the Great Depression, multiple conflicts contradict the German left’s pronouncement that war is “obsolete”, and climate change threatens the world as we know it. Christian fundamentalists still speak of End Times and the Rapture, including some inside the late unlamented Bush administration. Radical Muslims are in continual jihad against Western civilization and its elder brother Abrahamic faith, a desperate battle which will not end until industrial civilization ends. And now the Mayan prophecy, computed on independent calendars, of the world’s end December 21, 2012 stares us in the face.

Another camp, following mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, has translated the whole business of the singularity, occurring at the event horizon of the visible universe, into the human realm, as Stewart Brand explains in The Clock of the Long Now. The rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, throwing off the constants figured in the first half of the 20th century. Similarly, the rate of technological explosion is accelerating, and our ancient primate and mammalian encoded genetic make-up struggles to cope. Vinge thinks this isn’t just sci-fi, but that our consciousness is rapidly approaching singularity, something like a Black Hole, which, once entered, will feel like being pulled like a piece of taffy, infinitely, or until we change states. If you resist it, you’re torn apart. “Society itself could be dismembered, as some people ride the breaking wave of ever-new technology over the event horizon into invisibility while others lag behind, feeling the immense gravitational pull of still–accelerating tech, while no longer able to see it” (Long Now, 21).

The consensus date for this techno-singularity is 2035. What happens beyond that point is “unknown and unknowable.” The crest of the wave of humanity disappearing into the singularity is the new age tech version of the Rapture. Inventor Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near, 2005) speaks confidently of these highly skilled techno-surfers as becoming asymptotic to God, who would thus be the chaotic attractor within the Black Hole.

This leaves us a long way from the blueprints in our archaic genetic makeup. I have long been troubled by loose talk about “conscious evolution,” something you can go study with Andrew Cohen, or pursue as a higher degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Classical biological evolution has never been “conscious”; it is driven by natural selection, and the qualities being selected for may be very different from the consequences to the species of the traits produced. I believe deeply, however, in immanence, that the Divine is present throughout the universe at every level, and that all outer evolutionary traits express an interiority that is purposeful. Call me an adherent of Intelligent Design if you will, but I am not talking about a grand Wizard/Puppeteer, staging this whole thing from some archimedean point outside the universe. Divine intelligence is a kind of entelechy working from within, expressed in outer forms which only make sense when one sees the pattern of the whole.

Allan Combs tries to make sense of the different ingredients in “evolution soup” in his book, The Radiance of Being. He distinguishes biological evolution from historical evolution, which has more to do with the progressive development and maturation of the psychospiritual dimension, including progressive structures of consciousness. This is not the place to go into the vast sweep of the historical development of hominid consciousness. But the last step envisioned by Combs’ two theorists of these structures, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, may have the potential to position us at the cusp of the moment of singularity. Gebser called it the Integral stage, when all structures of consciousness work together to re-member the “ever-present Origin.” As in Vedanta, unlike biological evolution, which is seemingly without a goal, the telos of spiritual evolution is to remember that each of us seemingly separate sentient beings is, and always has been, the Origin, God.

My understanding of conscious evolution, as opposed to evolution of consciousness, is that it involves individual consciousness. It occurs after the awakening of the soul to its higher goal of divine fulfilment, throughout the history of the truly human. But lately, in the last 15-20 years, some theorists have begun speaking as if this individual process actually was the laboratory for conscious evolution of the species. As Thomas Berry put it in the Great Work, we are at the juncture where it is necessary to reinvent the human at the species level.

The work of Rupert Sheldrake, among others, shows that Lamarck's ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics may not be as far-fetched as we once thought, opening the door to the possibility of something like conscious evolution at the species level. But it still feels to me like a category error: what is true for the individual is not at all the same as what occurs at the species level. In Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy distinguishes between the transformation of individual consciousness and self-reflexivity on the level of social systems. She wonders if our current global eco-crisis might engender the next step in systemic self-organization, a holonic shift in group consciousness. But if this were to occur, would we call it “conscious evolution” or an evolutinary response from within the Gaian system to preserve interspecies equilibrium?

Theorists of biological evolution point to periods of relatively rapid evolution, when genetic changes happened far more quickly than the traditional Darwinian process would predict. Combs speaks of “emergent evolution” in terms of transforming individual consciousness, rapid quantum-like shifts rather than the gradual development characteristic of “constructive” evolution. There seems to be a collective fantasy for this to happen globally, working at the species level. The leading wave goes into the Singularity, and the rest of us are left behind on an aging terrestrial wreck. This would be something like the triumph of homo sapiens over neanderthalis. In that instance, we proved to be more adaptable to a wide variety of conditions, and technology apparently played a part in it.

Pressured by the immense force of accelerating technological advancement, New Age techies literalize the process of historical evolution of consciousness, observed in homo sapiens on a fortunately-placed planet in a particular solar system in the Milky Way, making it a just-so narrative. For them it is not a matter of analogy or metaphor, an as if scenario. The leading edge, asymptotic to God, will simply disappear into the Singularity. This is the twenty-first century modulation of space colonization, which, however unworkable and morally repugnant, clung to a faint echo of possibility.

This new sci-fi fantasy has power because of our intuitive pull to the immense attractor within the Black Hole. But it remains sci-fi for me, nevertheless. Vinge and Kurzweil make the category error of imagining that spiritual development and technological development, as an extension of biological evolution, are one, occuring on the same ontological plane. It may feel as if the high-flying techies have disappeared, which is certainly the experience I've had trying to be mutually present with some of them. But to actually disappear is another thing altogether. This is true as well of the “gravitational pull of still-accelerating tech.” We would not experience this pull unless we assented to it as a spiritual reality. Archaic spiritual practices still remain valid, for instance those of truly gifted shamans. Those anchored in the Origin are not to be numbered just among the accelerating crest of the tech wave.

Instead of following this Singular crowd, how about looking at our whole enterprise from the perspective of that crusty old nineteeth century discipline of population biology? Placing conscious evolution within the physical constraints of biological evolution might well be instructive. Hence , our next post, which is on to the sobering prospect of population overshoot and collapse.

Labels: collapse, conscious evolution, ermergent evolution, Joanna Macy, mayan prophecy, rapture, Ray Kurzweil, singularity, Thomas Berry

Isn’t this the elephant in the room? Secular enviros are scared to death to mention it, as are religious ecologists. Those most willing are the engineer-rationalist types, who have been warning of overshoot for decades now. It’s well past time this issue was brought into the deliberations on global ecological deterioration.

The human-earth relationship reached a critical moment when we pushed the planet past biocapacity, sometime around 1986. World population then was around 4.8 billion The latest figures, from 2006, put us at 130% of biocapacity, with the average biocapacity at 5.25 acres/person, whereas the average footprint (carbon, developed land, and food/fiber/timber) was 6.725. World population now is 6.7 billion. Population is definitely a critical component of our current, and potentially fatal, overshoot. Even at 4.8 billion, we were squeezing out other species’ habitat, and the extinction curve that is currently accelerating, now well over one hundred species a day, was already rising.

But it is absolutely critical to note the relative proportion of biocapacity used by the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 1 billion now use 100% of biocapacity (Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity)! The remaining 5.7, living marginally in cities and rural areas, use the overshoot amount. This does not mean we would reach steady-state if we simply got rid of those rich billion, which includes you and me. The desperately poor repeatedly cut down fledgling trees and sometimes eat “bushmeat” in the form of our simian cousins, simply to survive. But George Monbiot details the huge damage that the wealthy inflict upon the earth in a sobering recent post.

Despite global recession, wealth is increasing in some nations, along with population. The human drive for more and better has the developing world rapidly becoming just like us, or at least like the Europeans, who maintain half the carbon footprint of the US. For example, the biggest growth in car sales is in China and India. Along with the cars comes a huge growth in infrastructure as roads and parking space replacing crucial farmland. China no longer feeds itself, and though India, thanks to the Green Revolution, remains a net exporter of food, it is rapidly replacing arable land with sprawling cities and hydrodams. As for highway development, in 1968 I watched a motor rally on one of three national highways in India, spectators five-deep all along the route. It was one and a half lanes wide, heading north-south through Madhya Pradesh, across the Malwa Plain. Drivers were lucky to make it much past 40 miles/hour. Now India is building the Golden Quadrilateral, an interstate highway system reaching all the major cities. Paved roads are reaching further and further into the hinterlands, helping booming economic development. Many of those who owned cars ten years ago in places like Mumbai only had them as status symbols, because traffic density precluded actually driving them. Now vehicular embodied energy will be compounded by actually using petroleum and cement, as well as sacrificing land.

Subsistence farming, requiring additional family members to work the land, severely stresses the land, and competes too successfully for habitat needed by other species. But when one compares their modest footprint with the industrialized billion who feed at the top of the chain, the differences are huge. (See my previous post on the Remnant of the Meek). We in the US consume twice the carbon that Europeans and Japanese do, but seventeen times the amount consumed in Malawi. So having a child is a much more important decision in our culture than theirs, whose death rate has moreover doubled due to the scourge of AIDS.

We know that the principal indicator of number of offspring is the level of female education. Wherever young women have increased their level of education, the birthrate has significantly dropped. So it concerns me that highly educated and materially comfortable young couples in the US frequently have more than two children. If you inquire a bit, their usual answer is that they want to increase the pool of “good genes,” with occasional references to the rate of population growth among the underclasses, especially those of alien cultures and religions.

In a world that is already overpopulated, and the lifestyle of those with relative wealth the most significant factor in resource use, a decision to have only one biological child is much more ethical (see Bill McKibben, Maybe One, where he argues convincingly against the myth of psychic scarring from being an only child. See also the powerful graphic in New Solutions (#8, March 2006) for the huge range of resources the typical American infant will use in their lifetime: 3.3 million pounds of minerals, metals, and fuels). Having two is pushing things, since the population of the developed world is already using 100% of biocapacity. With the figure heavily dependent on lifestyle, a global population somewhere between 2 to 4 billion would allow for several of the ecosystems currently under human assault to recover, at least partially.

Parents the world over make their own decisions about having children. Even China has recently loosened its one child policy. I have discussed the option of having only one biological child with each of my sons. Jacob, the elder, thought for a long time that having one and adopting one was the way to go. But after deliberation with his wife, they decided to have two. Jesse is now also married, but still childless, and similarly speaks of one biological child. But his wife, who comes from a family with four children, always speaks in the plural.

Short of the government making rules in the matter, perhaps this choice needs to be more informed by the social group. Quaker Earthcare Witness, of which I am a member, counsels prospective parents to have a clearness committee with members of their Meeting before conceiving, to help them make the choice prayerfully after considering all the implications. It thus becomes an extension of the clearness for marriage, which is a serious matter, sometimes requiring many meetings to explore in depth. This seems like an intrusion of privacy to most people, but the social and ecological consequences of having a child in a rich country are enormous. Many thoughtful people acknowledge that the earth has too many human beings on it. If we don’t voluntarily limit our offspring, doesn’t it make sense for government to use its authority for the sake of the whole? The alternative is to leave matters to the Four Horsemen, who are already sharpening their swords.

Labels: biocapacity, clearness committee, climate change, Golden Quadrilateral, population crash, Quaker Earthcare Witness