Friday, October 24, 2014
Letting Go of Honest Hope
Honest hope. I have insisted upon it for several years now, ever since reading Dianne Dumanoski, who finishes The End of the Long Summer with a short chapter by that title. “In times of danger, bitter truths serve us better than sweet lies.” Blind hope kills, whereas honest hope accepts the immense uncertainty of the survival of civilization, even higher life, in an era beset by accelerating climate disequilibrium, which is offset by the tremendous capacity for adaptation and resilience shown by human evolutionary history.
Honest hope is
like tough love, continually tested by the realization that the only
certainty is immense uncertainty. Nature has always been uncertain.
But since we've flourished during a long calm, the 10,000-year
Holocene Epoch, we have become lazy. We take it for granted that
farmers will continue to feed 7 to 9 billion people and that we will
be able to suck out all the fossil fuels the Earth has sequestered to
replace animal power. We are used to easy street. The Big Easy
– New Orleans before Katrina. Though humanity has made it through
some very tough times, especially repeated eras of glaciation, we
have never faced rapid warming and all that sets in motion in the
biosphere. As one climate scientist recently said, “They have no
idea of what's coming.” The scale of climate disruption we face is
unprecedented.
Instead of
honest hope, hydra-headed denial fuels a flight from uncertainty into
Providence. Dumanoski outlines three forms of providential
salvation: faith in the technological fixes that have gotten us
through every bottleneck until now; deliverance by the invisible hand
of the market; and the clincher – deliverance through Apocalypse
and the end of human history. Though these may all sound like the
overconfidence of the political right, these fantasies lurk in us all
to some degree.
Grimly clinging
to my last thread of honest hope, I recently led a retreat entitled
“Collapsing Consciously.” Readers of this blog might recognize
the title from my review of Carolyn Baker (March 31). Though the very
structure of my retreats, which are based upon Joanna Macy's work in
moving through despair to an awakened level of coping, insures
residual or renewed hope, my dogged reading of the latest climate
science made my statement about honest hope the most tenuous ever. I
told the group that honest hope remained, but that it was tied to the
thinnest of moorings.
I was completely
honest with the group, outlining the latest IPCC report (as well as
its glaring omission of the Arctic methane emergency), the
tenuousness of the world economic order, and the continuing
geopolitical impasse over an international treaty on climate. The
latter was leavened by my joining the People's Climate March the
preceding week, but we don't know yet if that remarkable event will
lead to the necessary shift from protective nationalism to an
awakened last-hour accord. And in the central exercise, the Truth
Mandala, I once again confessed my fear that we would not survive
imminent climate apocalypse.
But the process
was resilient enough to allow the group to leaven my darkness and
fear, as participants shared their openness to the movement of the
Spirit in the midst of dire uncertainty. One person, who had spoken
twice of her despair, anger, and deep sadness over the earth crisis
came forward, placed both hands on the floor, and testified to the
hope that upheld everything. This brought me to a place of
wonderment, for shortly before I had pointed out that the very ground
of this ritual confession of our deepest feelings was hope. But I
had not experienced hope as I spoke. Her eloquent act brought
the Buddha's mudra, touch the earth, to
bear on our ritual.
As I reviewed the retreat afterwards, rereading Dumanoski's chapter on honest hope. I was startled to realize that my utilization of her concept had subtly morphed over time into a desire that, with some tweaking, the established order would survive. Despite years of wrestling with the central moral dilemma of anthropogenic global ecocrisis, I am still seized by our cultural myth, fearing a break with comforts and the tenuous security of the established order. Thus when I experience myself as cooly rational, I am still provisionally open to techno-fixes like geoengineering, nuclear power, or GMO's as inevitable in the brave new Anthropocene. But this is not honest hope. Honest hope means accepting the challenge of devolving from a complex extractive civilization to a cultural order that is resilient in the face of warming.
“We don't know.” So often my
audience says this when I point fatalistically to our impending end.
Too often this simply covers a deep-rooted denial of the gravity of
our situation. Sometimes it is the simple child-like faith that “God
wouldn't let us perish.” But it can also be a genuine openness to
the possibility for something new and unforeseen hidden in the
nucleus of our uncertain moment in history.
Towards the end of that retreat, I
actually found myself saying we don't know for the first time.
A sense of wonder and possibility was moving through the room; one
man named it the Holy Spirit. The place from which that sentence
surprisingly emerged was different from honest
hope. And since I later realized that what I was
calling honest hope was really a rationalization for a last-ditch
confidence that our way of life could be salvaged in some way, then
the statement was a tentative doorway to something deeper, even
scarier, and more real.
There
is a people's climate movement building, with many laudable efforts
such as fossil folly divestment, Transition Towns, rapid renewable
ramp-ups, shifts in agricultural practices, and a growing call for
replacing capitalism with an economic system that is responsive to
the earth's stability as well as a chastened but sustainable human
presence. But it appears as if we simply don't have time to make
changes; we have squandered too many chances. The days of
honest hope are coming to an end.
So
if we relinquish honest hope, what are we left with? We are in a
chiasm strongly reminiscent of the Hebrew community after the fall
of the First Temple. It is time for a prophetic response that
acknowledges the deep sadness and regret of our seemingly impossible
dilemma. Such a response would acknowledge that You
have broken God's covenant and will suffer for your ecological sins –
but
be nevertheless grounded in a deep place of hope. The Hebrew word is
batah:
confidence,
security, without care. It is redoubled in the New Testament with
the Greek elpis
(“whence cometh our help”) -
for elpis
is the root of “help.” Neither of these terms can be modified by
a downside, as we do with “hope” in everyday
speech. Biblical hope is complete, total. It is an unshakable
reality, not a feeling.
Even spiritually-minded moderns do not
often show this kind of hope. Usually when I hear folks testify to
it, I doubt them; surely their faith has not been sufficiently
tested. Well we are being tested, and “honest hope” is not going
to answer the test.
No matter how bad things get, we need
to continue to act as if our actions mattered, honest hope or no,
cultivating batah/elpis by
something like Paul's continual prayer. When asked the reason for
our hope as the world as we know it crumbles around us, answer as
Paul did in I Peter 3:15 – Be prepared to give the
defense that the Light (Christ) is in your Heart...
The experience of hope gives grounds for faith, what I call
cosmological faith. This
is not collapsing into the arms of Apocalypse, confident of a place
in heaven, but seeding the hope of the new Phoenix, whose form we
know not. Cosmological faith, rooted in biblical hope, is my anchor
when honest hope has become thin to the point of vanishing.
Labels: Anthropocene, Apocalypse, batah, climate change, Collapsing Consciously, cosmolgical faith, elpis, End of the Long Summer, geo-engineering, holocene, honest hope, Joanna Macy, technofixes, Truth Mandala
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
For the Children: Abrupt Climate Change, Cultural Autism, and the Thread of Hope
To My Children, Fearing for Them
Terrors are to come. The earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will
live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are
to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,
your eyes turning towards me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.
Wendell Berry published this poem in 1968. I know the children he speaks of through the poignant National Geographic photoessay focused on a Siberian farm family he imaginatively linked with his own, farming tobacco with horses in Kentucky. We had survived the McCarthy era, but Soviets were still demonized. And we had narrowly missed a nuclear exchange over the Cuban missile crisis. But here it was: the Siberian Woodsman (another poem) loved his children just as much as the poet loved his. Opposing nuclear arsenals arrayed against the demonized other, we were the same underneath.
Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. Forty years later, the theme remains. The earth is poisoned far beyond Berry's or anyone else's imagining, even as reactionaries chortle at Paul Ehrlich's failed projections of population doom. In 1986, two events signaled the coming terror, the Malthusian curse amplified by climate change. That was the year when we first exceeded the earth's annual biocapacity. In addition to rapidly burning the stores of ancient sunlight, our energy capital, we started eating into annual income. The other fact about that year was that it was the peak in grain production per capita (376 kilos), steadily declining ever since. Last year, one billion people were at risk of starvation. This year, we exceeded biocapacity on August 19, effectively employing 1.627 earths to maintain our current population of close to 7 billion.
Okay you say, but terror? Key Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are in favor of the new START treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, and the midnight clock of nuclear armageddon is poised to be set back once again (if we can keep Pakistan and Iran's hawks, and a few others closer at hand at bay). The answer lies in the Defense Department study under the last Bush administration comparing the threat of terrorism (the word is now a systematic part of both our vocabulary and government, with over a hundred new agencies dedicated to countering it) to that of “rapid climate change.” The study concludes that the latter threat far outweighs political terror.
Dianne Dumanoski's The End of the Long Summer (Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth) is an intelligent book cooly surveying the Damoclean sword of abrupt climate change and what we must do to avoid it, at least partially, and survive it (partially). I have read several books on climate change, including Bill McKibbens' recently released Eaarth, and Dumanoski's is the most comprehensive. She combines the geological and historical perspective of Tim Flannery's Weathermakers with McKibben's recital of the earth's current crisis through the lens of climate science, adding the valuable perspective of human evolutionary history and cultural biology.
Recasting McKibben's touchstone, The End of Nature (1989), Dumanoski speaks of the Return of Nature. McKibben took the historical perspective of a romantic, proclaiming the end of nature as we knew and loved her, recognizing the awesome ability of our species to dominate natural systems as a planetary power. From Dumanoski's perspective twenty years later, nature's return is the return of the repressed. The entire earth system is rising up to restore balance, and climate change is the main vehicle via which we will be chastened to our pre-agricultural and pre-industrial size, or else removed entirely from the system.
But while she acknowledges the huge challenge of our planetary emergency, Dumanoski cautiously affirms the history of our species in surviving some pretty harrowing moments of past climate change, including abrupt ones where climatic patterns shifted rapidly within a brief decade. We have already survived 700,000 years of climate variability, having evolved both a brain and cultural extensions of biological adaptation that have equipped us with the flexibility to deal with such crises – up to now. Clearly we have had a pretty easy time of it during the mild holocene, the last 12,000 years, tempting the species to overexpand as it triumphed over rivals - especially Neanderthalis - by being so remarkably adaptable and flexible. Yet we are now like a bacterial bloom that has eaten up all the fuel in the petri dish, and have nowhere else to go.
Given our precarious situation, we have the choice of changing the global industrial order, encouraged by international treaty to live sustainably in a carbon-neutral world averaging zero net economic growth, or continuing our clever manipulation of nature, “playing Prospero” with huge geoengineering technofix projects. She outlines both choices, and cautions against the latter, arguing that in effect we would be postponing the harder path of reining in our industrial excesses, placing an intolerable burden on future generations. And of course, we don't really know if these huge manipulations (like seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to simulate the effect of volcanoes, partially blocking incoming solar radiation) will even work, much as the scientists observing the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo did not really know if unleashing this powerful toy would destroy the atmosphere. (CONTINUED)
Terrors are to come. The earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will
live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are
to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,
your eyes turning towards me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.
Wendell Berry published this poem in 1968. I know the children he speaks of through the poignant National Geographic photoessay focused on a Siberian farm family he imaginatively linked with his own, farming tobacco with horses in Kentucky. We had survived the McCarthy era, but Soviets were still demonized. And we had narrowly missed a nuclear exchange over the Cuban missile crisis. But here it was: the Siberian Woodsman (another poem) loved his children just as much as the poet loved his. Opposing nuclear arsenals arrayed against the demonized other, we were the same underneath.
Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. Forty years later, the theme remains. The earth is poisoned far beyond Berry's or anyone else's imagining, even as reactionaries chortle at Paul Ehrlich's failed projections of population doom. In 1986, two events signaled the coming terror, the Malthusian curse amplified by climate change. That was the year when we first exceeded the earth's annual biocapacity. In addition to rapidly burning the stores of ancient sunlight, our energy capital, we started eating into annual income. The other fact about that year was that it was the peak in grain production per capita (376 kilos), steadily declining ever since. Last year, one billion people were at risk of starvation. This year, we exceeded biocapacity on August 19, effectively employing 1.627 earths to maintain our current population of close to 7 billion.
Okay you say, but terror? Key Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are in favor of the new START treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, and the midnight clock of nuclear armageddon is poised to be set back once again (if we can keep Pakistan and Iran's hawks, and a few others closer at hand at bay). The answer lies in the Defense Department study under the last Bush administration comparing the threat of terrorism (the word is now a systematic part of both our vocabulary and government, with over a hundred new agencies dedicated to countering it) to that of “rapid climate change.” The study concludes that the latter threat far outweighs political terror.
Dianne Dumanoski's The End of the Long Summer (Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth) is an intelligent book cooly surveying the Damoclean sword of abrupt climate change and what we must do to avoid it, at least partially, and survive it (partially). I have read several books on climate change, including Bill McKibbens' recently released Eaarth, and Dumanoski's is the most comprehensive. She combines the geological and historical perspective of Tim Flannery's Weathermakers with McKibben's recital of the earth's current crisis through the lens of climate science, adding the valuable perspective of human evolutionary history and cultural biology.
Recasting McKibben's touchstone, The End of Nature (1989), Dumanoski speaks of the Return of Nature. McKibben took the historical perspective of a romantic, proclaiming the end of nature as we knew and loved her, recognizing the awesome ability of our species to dominate natural systems as a planetary power. From Dumanoski's perspective twenty years later, nature's return is the return of the repressed. The entire earth system is rising up to restore balance, and climate change is the main vehicle via which we will be chastened to our pre-agricultural and pre-industrial size, or else removed entirely from the system.
But while she acknowledges the huge challenge of our planetary emergency, Dumanoski cautiously affirms the history of our species in surviving some pretty harrowing moments of past climate change, including abrupt ones where climatic patterns shifted rapidly within a brief decade. We have already survived 700,000 years of climate variability, having evolved both a brain and cultural extensions of biological adaptation that have equipped us with the flexibility to deal with such crises – up to now. Clearly we have had a pretty easy time of it during the mild holocene, the last 12,000 years, tempting the species to overexpand as it triumphed over rivals - especially Neanderthalis - by being so remarkably adaptable and flexible. Yet we are now like a bacterial bloom that has eaten up all the fuel in the petri dish, and have nowhere else to go.
Given our precarious situation, we have the choice of changing the global industrial order, encouraged by international treaty to live sustainably in a carbon-neutral world averaging zero net economic growth, or continuing our clever manipulation of nature, “playing Prospero” with huge geoengineering technofix projects. She outlines both choices, and cautions against the latter, arguing that in effect we would be postponing the harder path of reining in our industrial excesses, placing an intolerable burden on future generations. And of course, we don't really know if these huge manipulations (like seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to simulate the effect of volcanoes, partially blocking incoming solar radiation) will even work, much as the scientists observing the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo did not really know if unleashing this powerful toy would destroy the atmosphere. (CONTINUED)
Labels: biocapacity, geoengineering, holocene, Neanderthalis, peak grain, rapid climate change
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Remnants (first of four)
The prophet Isaiah, addressing a tribe once again exiled, this time among the Assyrians, spoke of the remnant of the just who would inherit a restored kingdom. As the most powerful empire ever assembled starts to crumble, and our geological era, the Cenozoic, heads into its terminal period due to the planet's fifth wave of extinction, we are once again in endtimes of biblical proportions. We must pray for a remnant who will sow the seeds of righteousness among men, as well as a remnant gene pool embedded in an ecosystem sufficient to repopulate the earth's web. For a just remnant at the end of a geological era needs address not only justice to our fellow man, but to the earth itself.
Let's be clear. In the Hebrew Bible, justice was never only a matter of how we treated one another, it operated within a land ethic to which the prophets constantly referred. Theirs was a world of farmers and herders, Cains and Abels, and unless one cared for the land, there could be no justice among men. But all "Axial" religions have worked within the axis of the holocene, the mild, stable climate we have enjoyed for the breadth of the neolithic revolution, or ten thousand years. What kind of ecosystem does the just remnant inherit when the holocene ends, and with it, neolithic stability? What crops does the farmer plant when the capriciousness of the weather becomes fundamental climate shift, and conditions in which crops grow are guaranteed to change during their lifetime? Justice at the end of the Cenozoic is more than human, more than a condition for right governance of lands we have colonized. It is fundamentally ecojustice.
The first remnant in this tradition was Noah, who preserved genetically viable pairs of all the visible species he could fit on the proverbial Ark. At the end of the holocene, we again face a flood, much more threatening than that which occurred in the Black Sea ca. 5600 BCE, yet again called to be Noahs. As with Noah, the just remnant in our time must address conditions not only for our species survival, not just the "land", beloved because of what it gives us, but the very conditions of life on the planet. Radical climate change invokes the possibility of a planetscape like Venus, or the infant Earth, where CO2 is so concentrated that the planet is too hot for life.
Who is this remmant, and how can we assure their success? Isaiah's colleague Elijah fled to the wilderness, fearful for his own preservation, for he considered himself the last just man among the Israelites. Yahweh came to him and said, "What are you doing out here? I tell you there are 7000 just men and women back amongst the tribal settlements. You just don't know who they are..." Elijah packed up and went back to town, reassured that others were quietly reinforcing his work.
Are we the change we have been looking for? The just remnant are not necessarily the prophetic, the charismatic, the self-anointed eco-warriors. One of their characteristics is facelessness and humility. Perhaps we will not recognize them until we become like them.
Let's be clear. In the Hebrew Bible, justice was never only a matter of how we treated one another, it operated within a land ethic to which the prophets constantly referred. Theirs was a world of farmers and herders, Cains and Abels, and unless one cared for the land, there could be no justice among men. But all "Axial" religions have worked within the axis of the holocene, the mild, stable climate we have enjoyed for the breadth of the neolithic revolution, or ten thousand years. What kind of ecosystem does the just remnant inherit when the holocene ends, and with it, neolithic stability? What crops does the farmer plant when the capriciousness of the weather becomes fundamental climate shift, and conditions in which crops grow are guaranteed to change during their lifetime? Justice at the end of the Cenozoic is more than human, more than a condition for right governance of lands we have colonized. It is fundamentally ecojustice.
The first remnant in this tradition was Noah, who preserved genetically viable pairs of all the visible species he could fit on the proverbial Ark. At the end of the holocene, we again face a flood, much more threatening than that which occurred in the Black Sea ca. 5600 BCE, yet again called to be Noahs. As with Noah, the just remnant in our time must address conditions not only for our species survival, not just the "land", beloved because of what it gives us, but the very conditions of life on the planet. Radical climate change invokes the possibility of a planetscape like Venus, or the infant Earth, where CO2 is so concentrated that the planet is too hot for life.
Who is this remmant, and how can we assure their success? Isaiah's colleague Elijah fled to the wilderness, fearful for his own preservation, for he considered himself the last just man among the Israelites. Yahweh came to him and said, "What are you doing out here? I tell you there are 7000 just men and women back amongst the tribal settlements. You just don't know who they are..." Elijah packed up and went back to town, reassured that others were quietly reinforcing his work.
Are we the change we have been looking for? The just remnant are not necessarily the prophetic, the charismatic, the self-anointed eco-warriors. One of their characteristics is facelessness and humility. Perhaps we will not recognize them until we become like them.
Labels: Axial religions, ecojustice, Elijah, holocene, Isaiah, just remnant, Noah, remnant
Thursday, November 29, 2007
When We've Been Here Ten Thousand Years
When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less time to sing God's praise than when we first begun. So the hymn "Amazing Grace" proclaims with artless triumph from the perspective of heaven: beyond time, everlasting. In a world where almost all bold predictions falter after 2050, the thought of some kind of human consciousness after 10,000 years is comforting. I would welcome angels here on this beloved earth, cheering us on as we belatedly seized the opportunity of avoided stewardship, but heavenly existence is not this earthling's goal.
Historically, ten thousand years has been a popular frame of measurement. The Greeks called it the Great Year, the length of an era. It is roughly the length of time since the invention of settled agriculture, and thus civilization, where cities (fortified granaries) and their specialized hierarchies replaced the yeoman's ancestor, the hunter-gatherer. She was not "self-sufficient" but lived in a band whose unit of sufficiency was the whole extended family.
We live at the end of the Great Year, the end of the holocene period, its moment of harvest. Fittingly, there is interest in the next ten thousand years. In an interview with New Dimensions radio host Michael Toms, Gary Snyder laughed at the question about human maturity: will we mature fast enough to save the earth in time? Snyder said we were still an adolescent species, and that maybe we'd reach maturity in another ten thousand years. Meanwhile, Stewart Brand and friends are building The Clock of the Long Now, which will keep time without fancy electronic gadgetry for another ten thousand years. The premise is that if we slow down the frenzied now, and focus on the slow movement of time, we can brake the forces presently catapulting us into oblivion. If they succeed, they will have achieved another pragmatic, neolithic-style sculpture along the lines of the astronomical calendar at Stonehenge.
Whether a remnant of our species in ten thousand years will be around to reap maturity and read the clock is another question. In my childhood the kid who wanted to save Mobile, Alabama from the Soviet Bomb, worried about nuclear Armageddon - along with a whole bureaucracy that regularly herded us under our desks, lines of cars waiting to ferry us out to the swampy countryside to relative safety. Now human adolescence is armed not only with nuclear bombs, but we have also perfected a global capitalism that is frightfully efficient at transforming earth capital into affluent effluent. Whole ecosystems are going into rapid decline, even as the CO2 we have already pumped into the atmosphere has yet to produce its warming effects, due to the twenty-year lag caused by the time it takes for the released gas to work its way through the earth's magnificent system of buffers.
If we survive, we will certainly not number in the billions, and the scarcity of resources that has the capitalist wolves licking their chops for gold, oil, platinum, and uranium stocks will no longer be an asset. Commodities will necessarily be replaced by skill, knowledge, and (finally) wise use, and any high tech that remains will necessarily be appropriate tech. A diminished earth will be busy re-knitting a less diverse network of species, even as the sun burns hotter, hastening towards its own winter.
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (The Universe Story) bravely speak of the "Ecologic" era replacing the Cenozoic (less grandly, a period replacing the holocene, which is roughly the same as the neolithic). If this reaches fruition, its foundations must be laid quickly by an adolescent species with a mission. But usually such behavior results in mistakes greater than than the perceived problem. Maturity is a long process, and at the species level, in geologic time, the two and half million years since the emergence of homo habilis hardly even merits the term "adolescence." Whatever the future of the human experiment, now poised at the midpoint of crucial back-to-back Great Years, maturity has never been synonomous with growth - the term end-game capitalists throw around so casually. Unchecked, disordered growth in the biological realm reveals itself as cancer, and economics is necessarily a subset of ecology. If there is actually the higher purpose to human emergence testified in "Amazing Grace," the biggest die-off and largest shift in earth climate since the dinosaur extinction will leave our species still standing, or crouching in polar caves, awaiting another Phoenix rising.
Historically, ten thousand years has been a popular frame of measurement. The Greeks called it the Great Year, the length of an era. It is roughly the length of time since the invention of settled agriculture, and thus civilization, where cities (fortified granaries) and their specialized hierarchies replaced the yeoman's ancestor, the hunter-gatherer. She was not "self-sufficient" but lived in a band whose unit of sufficiency was the whole extended family.
We live at the end of the Great Year, the end of the holocene period, its moment of harvest. Fittingly, there is interest in the next ten thousand years. In an interview with New Dimensions radio host Michael Toms, Gary Snyder laughed at the question about human maturity: will we mature fast enough to save the earth in time? Snyder said we were still an adolescent species, and that maybe we'd reach maturity in another ten thousand years. Meanwhile, Stewart Brand and friends are building The Clock of the Long Now, which will keep time without fancy electronic gadgetry for another ten thousand years. The premise is that if we slow down the frenzied now, and focus on the slow movement of time, we can brake the forces presently catapulting us into oblivion. If they succeed, they will have achieved another pragmatic, neolithic-style sculpture along the lines of the astronomical calendar at Stonehenge.
Whether a remnant of our species in ten thousand years will be around to reap maturity and read the clock is another question. In my childhood the kid who wanted to save Mobile, Alabama from the Soviet Bomb, worried about nuclear Armageddon - along with a whole bureaucracy that regularly herded us under our desks, lines of cars waiting to ferry us out to the swampy countryside to relative safety. Now human adolescence is armed not only with nuclear bombs, but we have also perfected a global capitalism that is frightfully efficient at transforming earth capital into affluent effluent. Whole ecosystems are going into rapid decline, even as the CO2 we have already pumped into the atmosphere has yet to produce its warming effects, due to the twenty-year lag caused by the time it takes for the released gas to work its way through the earth's magnificent system of buffers.
If we survive, we will certainly not number in the billions, and the scarcity of resources that has the capitalist wolves licking their chops for gold, oil, platinum, and uranium stocks will no longer be an asset. Commodities will necessarily be replaced by skill, knowledge, and (finally) wise use, and any high tech that remains will necessarily be appropriate tech. A diminished earth will be busy re-knitting a less diverse network of species, even as the sun burns hotter, hastening towards its own winter.
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (The Universe Story) bravely speak of the "Ecologic" era replacing the Cenozoic (less grandly, a period replacing the holocene, which is roughly the same as the neolithic). If this reaches fruition, its foundations must be laid quickly by an adolescent species with a mission. But usually such behavior results in mistakes greater than than the perceived problem. Maturity is a long process, and at the species level, in geologic time, the two and half million years since the emergence of homo habilis hardly even merits the term "adolescence." Whatever the future of the human experiment, now poised at the midpoint of crucial back-to-back Great Years, maturity has never been synonomous with growth - the term end-game capitalists throw around so casually. Unchecked, disordered growth in the biological realm reveals itself as cancer, and economics is necessarily a subset of ecology. If there is actually the higher purpose to human emergence testified in "Amazing Grace," the biggest die-off and largest shift in earth climate since the dinosaur extinction will leave our species still standing, or crouching in polar caves, awaiting another Phoenix rising.
Labels: cenozoic, climate change, Clock of the Long Now, ecologic era, extinction, global capitalism, Great Year, holocene
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
