Nearing the end of 2022, I’m drawn to reflecting on what it all means (and what it would mean if this series of stories were to be completed). To begin with, the world today is not the one I grew up in, and the transformation has occurred most rapidly during the course of my own lifetime, the last 78 years. This is not to diminish the importance of the history that came before it and the world I was born into, but simply to say that the history of humankind and the planet has vastly sped up in the last 78 years, and much of it not in a good way.
So it is more important to speak about the realities of today than about those of yesterday. We are facing, as most intelligent people have now recognized, a series of converging crises, most glaringly the climate and biodiversity crises, but also a half dozen others as a result of transgressing a number of other planetary boundaries. This critical juncture is unlike any other that humanity has faced, and imposes upon us a responsibility that no previous generation has had to face.
Our first responsibility is to choose where we stand in the matter of the continued existence of life on Earth more or less in the form that we know it now. If it does not matter to us, or if it does but we think there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s because we’ve forgotten who we are. We are the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution, as are all the creatures around us. Through the long and tortured history of the planet, we’re the ones who survived, who made it into the 21st century, who inherited the Earth and all that is in it and will pass it on in better or worse shape to our descendants. Do we not have a responsibility to those future generations? If not us, then who?
If we think that humans are fatally flawed then perhaps it makes no sense to perpetuate them; they will only do more damage to the Earth and to each other. The future matters, however, because of the possibility that future humans will be better humans. Perhaps we are not fundamentally flawed, just damaged by our upbringing and the story of modern civilization.
What we are beginning to realize, at this point in the 21st century, is the extent to which we have been living inside stories that are causing us and others a great deal of harm. One of the most remarkable expositions of this is Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, which reveals through a kind of Socratic dialogue the extent to which we are the captives of dominant cultural stories even when we believe we are rejecting them. The two central stories he is concerned with in the book are the colonization of history over the past 10,000 years — which teaches us that our post-agricultural-revolution civilization is a great triumph of rational thought over the ignorant ways of the “primitives” that lived for two or three million years before—and the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden, which is ultimately the story of humanity’s separation from nature.
We now understand, thanks to the writings of Charles Eisenstein and others, that it is this separation (and the religious stories through which it is asserted) that is responsible for the great damage we have done to the world. Believing ourselves to be apart from it and “given dominion over it,” we have acted as if this were true, and have eaten away at the natural capital we’ve inherited, and treated the Earth and its atmosphere as a place to discharge our increasingly toxic wastes.
Once we begin to realize that we’ve been had we start to wake up to some disturbing realities. First, that we are not separate from “nature,” and harming nature is literally harming ourselves. Second, that pre-agricultural ways of life were wiser and more aligned with nature’s systems and patterns than ours are — and that our modern ancestors did everything they could to forget, destroy, and eradicate them. We live today in an artificially created reality that is unsustainable — which seems solid and enduring, but that we know is not, because it depends on systems that are exceeding our planet’s natural ecological boundaries.
What we don’t know is what a sustainable civilization might look like. Is it sort of like the world we have now, only running on clean energy, with zero non-recyclable waste, and slowing the continued extinction of species? Or is it going to be something completely different?
Joe Brewer writes “The regeneration of Earth is a process that humanity must enact in the middle of a planetary-scale collapse.” This too is a story; it just happens to be one that better accords with the facts as we have come to understand them.
If this is true, we have a lot of work to do. We need to avoid being swept away by the worst consequences of this collapse, and work on healing the damage we have inflicted upon too many parts of Earth’s interconnected systems. We need to figure out our priorities and get to work on them, knowing that (a) we may be swept away at any moment by death and disease, war and natural disasters, social and economic breakdowns, (b) that our efforts may not succeed, and (c) that the efforts of others, whom we are counting on to address whatever we’re not focused on, may also fail.
Here’s what I’m working on currently:
- Supporting the Earth Regenerators network
- Working to restore the land and the community in our immediate environment, through
- Gardening
- Collaborating with others on a tree-planting initiative
- Collaborating with others on the creation of a Community PACE program
- Managing our own affairs so as to create sufficiency for ourselves and a surplus we can share with others
But there are also plenty of things I’m not working on. The dangers of nuclear war. Brownfields and superfund sites and toxic chemicals that are being released into the water, the soil, and the air. Transportation, The grid. Psychological trauma. Some of these things come up in writing or in conversation, but I don’t have anything useful to say about them. It makes sense to focus on what I think matters most at the time, and to take advantage of opportunities as they come along. Hence, for example, the tree-planting proposal — it just seemed an easy way to connect with the main underserved community in Rochester, and the more I thought about it the more it made sense.