Editor’s Note: In our fight for the defense of the natural world, it is important that we feel connected to nature. Given that there is so little left in the world that could be called “natural,” it may be hard to do for many of us. It is in this spirit that we bring to you a story of a walk into the wilderness of Nuyts in the south west of Western Australia. At the beginning of the year, we hope you feel closer to your roots: the mother Earth.
Finally, exactly two months after my birthday, we had the time, headspace and energy to go do the Nuyts Wilderness Walk that was my birthday hike choice for this year. We had done a gorgeous reconnaissance hike in preparation for it a couple of months back, and it was good to at last have a day set aside in good weather for this long and special wilderness trail.
We began near the Deep River bridge and set out for Thompson Cove.
Did I mention the old-growth Karri/Tingle forest is awe-inspiring? There is so little of it left – I wish I could travel back in time 250 years to see this place before it was colonised by a destructive industrial culture which has chewed its way through most of the coastal ecosystems since arriving – and to put an invisible shield around Australia to stop Europeans from ever finding this continent. Imagine Australia if it had remained in the hands of its Indigenous people, who lived here for 60,000 years without utterly destroying the place.
Track maps and information on local hikes were posted near the bridge.
Today we were heading for Thompson Cove, but we are keen to do this gorgeous walk all over again to check out alternative destination Aldridge Cove.
On our reconnaissance walk into the Nuyts we had gone from John Rate Lookout via Mt Clare to this bridge – which is so wobbly we crossed it one at a time so we’d not fall over!
Nice views of the Deep River in either direction – this is one of the few rivers in South-Western Australia which still has intact riparian vegetation and relatively clean water. Most of the others, including the Swan and Canning Rivers in the state capital, are polluted sewers with denuded and eroded banks. When we walk in conservation areas like this, we get a glimpse of the world as it was before Homo colossus began to systematically destroy it.
You may notice the water is brownish. This is caused by natural tannins in the riparian vegetation. Imagine it as a kind of cold-brewed tea. There are many rivers and inlets on the South Coast which naturally contain tannins from the surrounding native vegetation. In Scotland this happens in peat bogs; people traditionally tanned leather there. Here’s Tom Langhorne explaining how that is done, without causing the kind of environmental damage and waste associated with industrial tanning. By the way, many hides these days are going into landfill because of vegan objections to leather, and the low cost of synthetic and non-biodegradable substitutes – which is so utterly wasteful, earth-polluting and nonsensical.
One of Tom Langhorne’s many wonderful videos on traditional survival skills in his native Scotland
The first walk section immediately after the bridge took us through Karri forest. Here’s some of the beauty all around in that place. This vibrant banksia flower below was one of a cluster on the ground. Local cockatoos often nip off flowers and fruits this way – but only some of them.
Walking, you will often go through stands of Casuarinas in the forest, which create a little world of their own. The path we were on was wonderfully soft and springy; the sort that you would walk on for hours just for the joy of it. The aromas in the air were a lovely mix of freshness, recent rain, earth, aromatic oils from the various myrtaceous species, fungi, and the decomposition of plant materials in the humus layer. Get down on the ground sometime after rain in a natural forest, lift some of the leaves off the ground until you get to where the fungal mycelia are, and take some deep breaths. One of the best smells on the planet.♥
And this is not the same in a tree plantation – yet many modern people would not be able to distinguish between a natural forest, a logged forest and a plantation. Of course, there are few remnant forest ecosystems left, so most contemporary Westerners have never walked in one; we’re lucky on the South Coast of Western Australia that there are still patches of it around. Those places are incomparable and took many thousands of years to become what they are. One of the reasons I write these hiking photoessays is to show people who haven’t had the opportunity to experience for themselves what Australian remnant ecosystems look like up close.
And here’s one of Jess and me.
I always find it astonishing to look at the impoverished parklands people create around cities that they apparently find aesthetically appealing. I hike in what nature has made; it’s absolutely no comparison. This forest is a wonderland filled with life and its life-sustaining processes. It is species-rich, complex and interconnected to such an astounding degree. If anyone hasn’t read Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life yet, let me highly recommend it.
We took lots of photos of mosses, lichens, fungi. This is nature recycling, and making a great deal of beauty and life doing so. Our culture talks about recycling and it’s mostly a myth – in nature it’s a law.
Below you can see the construction of an ant-lion, who creates a funnel to trap prey insects to feed on. In nature, the population excesses of each species become food for another species so that no species assumes plague proportions, and diversity can flourish. It is important for Westerners to have a good look at their attitudes to mortality, which is not the tragedy it is made out to be by people who are more invested in fear and ego survival than they are awed by the circle of birth-life-death-life in nature, going around like a gift and creating the most astonishing and beautiful world in which we get a brief turn on the stage which we should honour, and learn our kinship in.
Most people who haven’t grown up near places like this see predator-prey as “nature red in tooth and claw” – well, who’s projecting but Homo colossus, the most destructive species of them all, harbouring many pathological individuals who kill for kicks or greed, not for basic sustenance – a culture that has destroyed much of the biosphere itself, instead of taking basic sustenance from other species’ reproductive excess and yielding themselves in turn at the end.
Woodland and heathland alternated with patches of forest as we progressed towards the coast.
It’s fungal fruiting season since the autumn rains finally saturated the earth, and it’s spectacular. We took lots of photos and we know Sara will enjoy those.♥ Fungi are amazing creatures. I would really like people to understand that all life forms are alive and precious – not just humans and the animals we find cute. Also, that all life is sentient, not just things with a nervous system like our own.
Also that the species is more important than the individual. In nature, individuals feed on other individuals in the food web, but they do not exterminate entire species – something our completely insane ecocidal culture does routinely, and currently at the rate of ~200 species every day. I can’t tell you how obscene that is; and the utter irony that so much destruction is being carried out as we speak by making so-called “green” technologies.
Also news flash: “Green” vegan soy (which is grown in destructive monocultures and shipped from far away) isn’t a lesser environmental problem than people eating the grass-fed herbivores on their own locality’s existing pastures. People should eat as locally as possible and avoid as much as possible all forms of intensive animal or plant production. I’m having a relatively easy time avoiding feedlotted animal products as a smallholder, eating the beef off our own grass, pastured eggs and dairy grown by other local smallholders, and accessing organically grown F&V from my own garden. I am having a very hard time coming off the intensively farmed plant products that form the backbone of calorie intake for most of us: The cereals, the legumes, mostly grown as monocrops with high fertiliser, herbicide, pesticide and fossil fuel inputs in devastated countryside far from where I live. The flour for my bread, the lentils for my soup. No wonder Irish peasants ate a lot of potatoes, and that I am always trying to grow more of them. It’s the most calorie-dense plant food I can grow, but it’s not an easy crop. I need to collect a lot of animal manure to grow it.
The central problem is how far we have drifted from being a part of the food web. Ideally you’d be hunter-gathering, but most of the world’s natural ecosystems have been devastated by our industrial culture, and most of us have neither the constitution nor the skills required for that kind of life. We are moored in our own modernity, with the wreckage all around us. The best I can do is to try to grow my own food and eat as locally as possible. My husband and I consider native ecosystems sacrosanct and live where we do to steward for conservation 50 hectares of native sclerophyll woodlands and heathlands that came with 10 hectares of pasture on which we run a smallholding according to organic and permaculture principles. We’re planting shelter belts and wildlife habitat into the pasture, battling invasive species (like local pasture mainstay kikuyu, an African runner grass) with glyphosate to be able to do this (the lowest-impact herbicide for conservation work – please read the downloadable pdf in this link if you want to understand the context), don’t have tractors or any other fossil fuel driven farm machinery and are feeding ourselves and others while fine-tuning our practices.
In an ideal world we’d all be working on getting back to entirely local low-external-input food-growing systems that allow wildlife back into devastated areas, while drastically reducing our family sizes to counteract the at least tenfold overshoot of our species – but that’s another topic. When we are hiking in natural ecosystems like this, I can’t help but be aware that human beings lived in and off these original Australian ecosystems for 60,000 years without bulldozing or ploughing or polluting or concreting over anything, and without taking more than they needed. They also took active steps to limit the offspring they produced and lived in a harmony with their environment that our own massively destructive and ever-expanding coloniser culture can only dream about.
Do you notice how the leaf margins of the tree seedling above have been gnawed? This is normal life in a food web. Were this an ornamental in a park or garden, many Homo colossus would reach for a bottle of pesticide and exterminate insects, who are “bad” for causing such “damage” (we’ll skip the massive irony over who is saying that). But in a natural system, a degree of herbivory on the leaves of plants is as normal and necessary as a degree of predation on animals, for reasons discussed earlier. There is inbuilt resilience to such losses, and if you plant some eucalypts away from their natural ranges, they may break entire branches from excess weight because their foliage isn’t being appropriately pruned by the herbivores that feed on them.
Below we have a photo of a Macrozamia palm. Local Noongar people collected their large seeds to eat. Like many of their traditional plant foods, these seeds required soaking to leach out toxic chemicals. The local Indigenous diet was quite high in animal foods and comparatively low in plant foods. Australia is one of the most difficult places to survive hunter-gathering. Local marsupial mammals have an about two degree Celsius lower body temperature than the average placental mammal, to conserve energy on the available resources. The kangaroo has one of the most energy-efficient locomotion methods on the planet. Koalas, surviving off difficult to digest eucalyptus leaves, are super-slow, like sloths.
To survive in the Australian bush, humans have to be prepared to eat whatever is available: The plant seeds, tubers and greens they can find and detoxify if necessary, larger animal species like kangaroo and emu, the small mammals like bettongs and possums which have gone into rapid decline since the arrival of the Europeans, birds, eggs, fish, shellfish, lizards, turtles, frogs, and insects like the Witchetty grub, which an elder from a different Australian region to ours shows us the ins and outs of in the clip below.
I love the attitude of the Indigenous people in this clip to eating the grub. It’s just food. If you see a white Australian demonstrate how to eat a Witchetty grub, there is usually a lot of chest-beating and machismo to go with the meal. The kids I taught in high school often wrinkled their noses at the idea of eating a grub, but as I pointed out to them, most of us love and regularly eat evaporated condensed bee vomit (honey). It’s just that we don’t call it that.
We also eat matured plant ovaries (fruit), ground-up plant embryos and their endosperm (flour), whole plant embryos (in almonds, peanuts etc), and mussels which are during the breeding season largely ovary and/or testicle, and all their other innards. Then there’s eggs; I’m sure I don’t have to explain where those come from. And cheese, well, that is a product made from the secretions of a modified sebaceous gland, fermented by microbes and containing their excrements. And it’s delicious.
To which the middle school age range often said, “OK, Miss, I’m never going to eat anything else again!” But of course they did; the point is, it’s just that much of what we do is not considered, it’s unthinking autopilot. Especially if you’re buying processed food or even packaged meat, you can be totally divorced from the consciousness that living beings are the sustenance of other living beings (unless you can photosynthesise, and even then, plants need the minerals from the dead bodies of other living things and help recycle those). You don’t see where your food came from and you should see where it came from. If you grow your own, or even buy from local growers, you can be much more aware of what is sustaining you, where it came from and whether you are OK with that.
And you can at leisure consider whether it is fair on other life forms to have more than one child in our current human overshoot situation, where we have already converted much of the planetary biomass into humans and their agricultural plants and animals and driven countless species into extinction with our anthropocentrism and narcissistic focus on individual rights to do as we damn well please.
People lived here once, and ate what the forest provided, and did not take more than they needed, or sell any of it to anyone, for a profit or at all. And before our ecocidal culture, so did our ancestors; don’t forget this. We are all descended from people who once were hunter-gatherers, and were conquered by the sociopaths who were advantaged by the toxic culture of conquest, and their enablers. Remember this when you notice sociopaths and their enablers in our own day and age.
These pretty shelf fungi are rumoured to be edible. Of course, as was explained to me when I was little: All mushrooms are edible; some only once. I love mushrooms, to look at and to eat – but as I am living outside of these remnant ecosystems, and my later ancestors were agricultural people, I feel duty bound to try to scrape my food from what I can grow in an ecocide zone that I am simultaneously trying to help the wild things back into.
Xanthorrhoea preissii, the grass-tree pictured below, was dubbed a Blackboy by Europeans for its resemblance (when it carries a flower stalk) to an Indigenous hunter standing on one leg holding a spear. It’s an image that makes the child in me smile and the adult in me long for the time when that would have been a common sight in this part of the world. Those were far better days, ecologically and in terms of social justice. The ecological part of my statement is self-evident. The social part: Indigenous societies, while not perfect either, did not routinely dispossess a large part of their tribe in order to provide a small part with unjustified riches and a pedestal from which to spit on and oppress others. Unemployment and homelessness were not things that plagued their worlds. Yet our Western culture has made many people homeless, and so many billions and billions of wild creatures that it crushed and drove out.
The tree below lost its top some time ago, maybe to lightning or a storm – but look how it grows regardless, and is beautiful in how it is shaped by its responses to challenges. You don’t see trees like this in city parks – they would be considered objectionable, like a supermarket apple that doesn’t look like a plastic model of an apple and exactly the same as all the others. Anything like that, our ignorant and soulless culture wants to throw out, cut down, dismiss, destroy, replace with something “better”.
I love wild places like this, and feel deeply at home in them. I remember I am an animal and the earth is my mother. And though the people of my own culture have ransacked this planet and its wildlands, and driven many of my brothers and sisters to extinction, and brought genocide and awful ongoing suffering to cultures more benign and wiser than our own, my heart recognises my home and who I was supposed to be; and this I will try to be, for as long as I have breath.
Credit for my hiking staff goes to my husband, who began making them a few years ago from selected branches of different origin. Mine is made from a pine sapling that is an invasive species here and grew in a grove across the road from us, where each year dozens more pines pop up, potentially displacing trees more useful to wildlife. At least the cockatoos eat their seeds, but this also spreads them.
Next we crossed another footbridge over a nice clear stream. This is like something out of Lord Of The Rings, like Rivendell. I think one deep reason many of us are drawn to imaginary places like that is because so much of that was once real – the natural world before civilisation, industry, pollution, power lines, roads, cars – and are an alternative route we could have taken, had sociopathy and soullessness not created Homo colossus. Our culture is the Orcs, is Sauron, slicing up the Ents and anything else it can get its hands on as fodder for its greed and its never-ending wars.
Here is the base of a Karri tree so you can see it bark. Karri is called Eucalyptus diversicolor because of the colour of its bark.
In the next photo, we are looking up at this massive tree, and it is impossible for me to fit all its branches into the frame.
Remember, all these things make themselves and each other. It took millions of years to get here, and our mainstream culture has no qualms about getting its chainsaws out in a place like this, or bulldozing it to the ground to make way for its suburbs, freeways and industrial estates. Homo colossus takes living ecosystems, degrades or outright kills them, and turns them into dead commodities and built environments. The word some American Indigenous tribes have for that kind of insanity is wetiko – literally a virus of selfishness, an evil spirit that invades the human mind and makes a person insatiable.
These are blackboy stems, in various stages of being recycled.
I just love the way some trees grow all gnarly in a natural ecosystem.
Increasingly, the coastward path took us through heathlands with very sandy, acid soils.
This is where you can find a lot of carnivorous plants. Western Australia is estimated to have over a third of the world’s carnivorous plant species. The soils here are ancient and have been leached over millennia of the fertility of geologically young soils. The sand in valley floors like this is referred to by farmers as “gutless” but hosts many of our biodiversity hotspots. It turns out that challenging conditions combined with geological stability and a long continental isolation result in a plethora of evolutionary solutions, including many unusual cooperative relationships. The carnivorous plants are straightforward – it’s an advantage to be able to catch your own organic fertiliser. A number of lineages did that, and evolved into different directions which differentiated into new species over time.
These lovely rosettes are sundews (Drosera spp), of which there are many different species. Some are rosettes, other filigreed climbers. The rosette varieties tend to throw up one central flower sometime in spring, usually white. If you look closely, you will see “dewdrops” at the ends of fine hairs. These are sticky secretions with digestive enzymes. Midges and other small insects are caught like on flypaper and digested in situ. The minerals are absorbed through the leaves.
We were now mostly in coastal heathlands with clumps of stunted eucalypts, and could see the edges of the coast.
At this point we reached a track turning that made a good lunch stop.
Behind Brett is an access track that looks like it might be worth exploring in future years, as this is such a lovely area.
Both the Bibbulmun and the Nuyts tracks turned left at this point. This was the view ahead.
We sat under a tree at the track intersection and had slices of “dog food” – nicknamed thusly because it has rice and animal protein like a dog kibble and is a fairly complete food. It’s actually a baked rice slice with tuna, cheese, egg, yoghurt, spring onion and cracked pepper. Even the dog likes it, of course.
And then we were off again for the second half of the trip to Thompson Cove.
We found an ants’ nest with a quite spectacular ground cover next to it.
There was a strange denuded area that ran right and left of the track at one point. It is really tempting to blame humans for that; must’ve done something…
In the distance in the picture below is one of those famous blackboy flower spikes that looks like a long spear held aloft.
If you get photographed in front of one, it gives the impression of having an exotic over-the-top hairstyle.
We were heading for that coastal headland in the distance that is just creeping over the horizon.
We got to a lovely large stand of banksias. These are highly susceptible to the imported pathogen Phytophthoracinnamomi; this was still a dieback-free area. Many banksias have been killed in Australian conservation areas by the spread of this disease.
And then we could smell the ocean we were rapidly approaching.
At the Thompson cove turn-off, we saw that the track would take us down a steep V-shaped valley with a stream running through its centre. This was fun to walk, sort of like a place in a child’s adventure story from the time of Enid Blyton or before, when many Western children still routinely went to interesting natural places on foot or by bicycle. It is extraordinary how this has changed in a very few generations; now most Western children grow up like battery chickens in suburbia, usually cooped up indoors, and in severe nature deficit. The world population has more than tripled since Enid Blyton wrote her stories, and much of that extra population has been crammed into cities. This isn’t fair on children, or on the wild places that have been exterminated in order to grow the human population further into overshoot – or for that matter on the wild places that remain and don’t have the love and respect of those children.
And there was Thompson’s Cove (which should of course have a Noongar name, since Thompson was not the first person to encounter it).
Little teensy coves like this are scattered along the South Coast in-between the bigger coves and bays. It is always a pleasure to discover them in your own life during a long walk. I am one of those people who believes coves like this should only be reachable on foot, though of course, the mainstream is trying to “improve accessibility” for the disabled (which I can understand) but mostly for the lazy who think it’s too much effort to get fit and walk on your own two feet. This is why more and more habitat is being bulldozed for 4WD access, and more and more remote beaches are churned up as members of Homo colossus treat them like their private demolition derby tracks, scare the wildlife off them and leave their rubbish and excrement behind everywhere.
Places that are only accessible on foot on long walks tend along our South Coast to still be free from the tide of plastic rubbish that is choking the natural world. It’s funny how the hikers tend to be a different type of person to the 4WD-ing general public – and in Australia, the majority of people who can afford the loans now drive 4WD and SUV. These monstrosities now outnumber erstwhile “normal” cars on our roads. This is one reason the fuel efficiency of the average car on the road hasn’t improved in Australia since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the population of the country more than doubled, and an even bigger percentage of that bigger population now drive cars, neatly demonstrating that both skyrocketing population and increasing consumption per capita are killing our planet.
We found no rubbish in Thompson Cove and I do not need to tell you how rare an experience that is becoming. It’s also likely that the kind of hikers who visit here would pick up any rubbish they see in a place like this and carry it out. And this is a good time to mention Melissa from our online group, who does exactly this at Lake Tahoe in America.♥
We sat down to have afternoon tea on the side of this cove: Slices of home-made pecan pie and slugs of hot tea from thermoses.
Southern Ocean seas are massive this time of year; the waves crashed spectacularly over the rocky points. Across the water, far away, only Antarctica. So, there is a wide fetch that the Roaring Forties can work into a frenzy.
In a cove like this, you have to take off your boots to feel the sand beneath your feet.
And you have to bestow affection on the aging dog, who has been just the best dog ever the whole 10 years since we adopted her from a farm dog breed rescue when she was 9 months old and had been discarded by a Homo colossus into bushland far from any town to fend for herself (and I would like to do the same with her erstwhile owner). The ranger thankfully came across her, but she was still very skinny after being fed for a few weeks at the rescue.
There was a fair bit of upside-down wiggling and doggie laughing. We once caught that rigmarole on film at a hiking hut on the Nullaki Peninsula:
Occasionally you visit a place where you don’t just take off your boots in response, but your whole kit. It’s a bit like taking off your shoes when you visit a temple. It’s just that nature is the actual temple, and when you get to an unspoilt place like this where the temple has not been sullied, it’s an instinctive response to strip yourself down to your essence and to shed all the layers that civilisation has put on you – both clothing and metaphor.
We thought about including some spontaneous black-and-white photographs of bare backsides and the sea in this actual report – just like in National Geographic articles on members of other cultures than Homo colossus which still survive in small pockets around the world and practice their traditions. However, those didn’t turn out, and those that did – well, we weren’t going to inflict anything full frontal on our audience, for various reasons, although it would have led to an extended rant on the current fashion for infantilising adult females by getting them to remove their pubic hair, something that has astonished me for a long time. I don’t partake in that, thank you very much – I like having a bush, and pubic hair has several useful functions, one of which – friction reduction on delicate bits of undercarriage – should be fairly obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time hiking; but it seems some people prefer to take off what nature has kindly provided, and then use products with names like Anti Monkey Butt, which will help keep our economy rolling etc.
Then yours truly and lovely husband retraced our steps up the steep valley around the little stream that pours into the sea at this location.
Halfway up there was a flat area where other visitors had put on a camp fire recently.
This was the view back to the cove. This really is an incredible place.
We have a few more photos from the return trip; here’s a group of vistas taken from near the banksia grove in the vicinity of the track turning where we had had our lunch earlier.
Back at the track turning, we had a rehydration stop. The dog has her own bottle when we go to places there isn’t plentiful fresh water.
Beautiful large Karri tree that has been there since before I was born; and these days, that’s saying something. I now keep age-related matters simple by rounding myself up to the nearest 100.
Even a tree hollow is its own universe. Everything in nature is like one of those Matryoshka dolls – layers and layers and layers, except each layer is unlike the one before. You could find more layers going up closer, over and over until you end up with subatomic particles and energy and space, and the further mysteries of that. Or you could zoom out, to the tree, to its immediate neighbourhood, to the forest, to the regional biosphere, to the continent, and go up and up until you were in amongst the stars looking down at the beautiful, fragile, once blue-green planet floating like a marble in space. And you could go further out until you are in the Horsehead Nebula, and then some.
Meanwhile Homo colossus is focusing on its toys, status, drama and political cycles, busy obliterating the biosphere of that fragile marble so that its investment portfolios can grow, ho hum, pass the butter.
I really hope this eucalyptus seedling grows into a hundred-year-old tree…
More beautiful little universes. How anyone could on reflection think them worth trading for the universal dross of Homo colossus is beyond me.
And this concluded our Nuyts Wilderness hike, for this day. The old dog had enjoyed herself and was looking forward to a decent meal, followed by curling up on her sofa at home.
Thank you for joining us on our hike and our reflections. We hope you have enjoyed the photographs of this beautiful wilderness area that we wanted to bring back for those of you who are in different parts of the world, and that you can feel that a part of you has now been there too.♥
All the pictures in the post are taken by Brett and Susanne Coulstock
A Note of Gratitude
At the end of the year 2023, we would like to thank all of our supporters. Your constant support, by any means that you can, has helped us to do our part in defense of the natural world. Thank you!
Also, at this moment, we would like to inform you that there had been some technical glitch in our normal donation server. We would like to humbly thank our donors for bringing that to our notice. For those of you it has inconvenienced, we would like to sincerely apologize and inform you that we have set up a temporary donation site for that purpose: https://givebutter.com/SA0iCU
Editor’s Note: The scientific method is considered the best at explaining natural phenomenon – for good reason. However, science also has limitations.
First, science has a limited scope. It requires evidence beyond reasonable doubt for any explanations to be considered reliable. It can only make predictions based on those explanations. What if there are some real phenomena that cannot be “proven” yet? In that case, what alternative assumptions do we use to make predictions?
Second, (quite contrarily to what most scientists claim) science is not value free. And science cannot be value free, as long as the scientists remain value laden.
The alternative assumptions that science uses to make real life predictions are based on those values of the scientists, and of science as a field of study. Most often than not, these values support the status quo.
There is a reason that climate scientists have repeatedly failed to make reliable predictions about the upcoming ecological collapse. The sooner that scientists accept and acknowledge these (and other) limitations, the better it is for the natural world! The following piece explores some of these issues.
“Science, as it is practiced in our society, is a nearly perfect expression of human supremacy. It’s all for us (humans); it’s all about us.” – Tom Murphy
Scientists have been in the news of late fretting that their projections about the onset of disasters caused by a warming climate may have been off the mark.It appears that Mother Nature has pushed the “fast forward” button and we are all paddling, choking, and sizzling much sooner than sober science had led us to expect. We will be hard-pressed to devise a plan of action commensurate with the trouble we are in if we come at that task wielding flawed assumptions.Events cannot speak of their own accord but if they could recent ones would surely be telling us that any forecasts based on conditions prevailing even until yesterday are not worth much. We have entered a new phase in the life of our planet and, by all appearances, do not have a clue about what that circumstance demands of us as inhabitants.I am not a scientist, but I did recently encounter a related case of cluelessness that I thought I might try to diagnose. Writing in The New Yorker (07/24/2023), Louis Menand pauses at the end of an essay on the rise and fall of neoliberalism to take stock of its achievements and failings. On the positive side, he claims that globalization has lifted a billion people out of poverty, lowered the cost of many household items, turned formerly marginal nations into “economic players,” and broken the monopoly held by First World powers on modern technology. On the debit side, he notes a deepening “trend towards monopoly” in every major industry and a disturbing increase in inequality. This latter, he believes, fouls the workings of democracy and thus poses a threat to civic order.Menand is not a hack. He is a diligent researcher, a thoughtful cultural observer, and a gifted stylist whose books are read and discussed within and beyond the academy. The reader who consults any of his books and essays for insight into American history or contemporary politics will find much of substance to chew on. Yet his summary assessment of the ideas that have been dominant in official circles for the last four decades lags even farther behind the visible course of events than the too-cautious calculations of the climate scientists. Perhaps he and the scientists have inherited the same conceptual defect.Suppose that Shell Oil hires several dozen young Nigerians to help protect its facilities from any local villagers who might harbor ill will against it for poisoning the land base that once supported an economy of small market fishing and farming. As long as these new hires make more than $2.15/day they would count among the billions being lifted out of poverty by globalization. That is how the World Bank, the source of Menand’s numbers, measures economic progress. The wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems, along with the ways of life that flourished for centuries within them, do not figure in these calculations. The World Bank cannot quantify such things so Menand finds no occasion to discuss them. Overheating oceans and atmospheres, environmental degradation, species extinctions, soil depletion, water scarcity, drought, fire, flooding, crop failures, mass migrations – none of these worrisome developments make their way onto Menand’s ledger, even as all of them were either caused or sharply accelerated by fossil fuel-powered globalization. Progress is happening when people who once farmed and fished for a living get funneled, by whatever means and onto whatever station, into the wage economy. So long as “our” household items stay cheap, we have cause to celebrate. So long as the list of “players” in this game keeps expanding and the technology needed to keep the global machine humming gets spread around a bit, what’s to worry?As recently as seven or eight years ago I might have nodded along with Menand’s assessment of neoliberalism. It is reasonably argued by the standards I then used to measure what it was reasonable to consider when exploring such a topic. Now, such arguments provoke the kind of irritation we feel when someone adopts an attitude of command after, in plain view, missing the boat entirely. What happened?Two things. First, there is the news. The polycrisis, as many are calling it, has unsettled my preferred means of making sense of the world. Procedures that once seemed soundly empirical suddenly appear woefully constricted. Facts that once grounded the kinds of arguments I deemed credible were dwarfed by realities that no one seemed willing or able to treat as facts of relevance to what was going on around me. Second, my realization that I have been poorly served by the analytic tools I knew how to use inspired me to search for replacements in places that I would have not thought to visit before. I read books on animal intelligence and plant communication. David Abram’s books shattered the foundations of my philosophical outlook, creating cracks for wilder, less head-heavy insights to grow. I stopped feeling sheepish about nodding in agreement with Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth. My growing suspicions about the serviceability of Western science opened me up to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s respectful humbling of it and to the value generally of indigenous modes of understanding. I read nearly everything written by Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.I am most likely a pagan now, if by that term we mean someone who believes it was a really bad idea to drain all of the spirit out of the natural world and invest it in a single, vengeful sky god whom we must propitiate in a manner prescribed by one pleasure-phobic priesthood or another. I am not an atheist because when I am hiking alone under old trees or watching seabirds in flight I frequently feel myself drawn into a force field of enchantment where words fail and the mind stalls. I believe it is historically warranted to call that field “sacred” and, if we are to undo the damage done by those who believe otherwise, strategically necessary.From where I sit now, it seems clear that Menand and the climate scientists were betrayed by a desire to appear reasonable. In the gap between their conclusions and the horizon where the hard edge of reality now cuts we can measure the obsolescence of Reason as it has been conceived in the West for the last four centuries. Events quite near at hand are making it increasingly difficult to dismiss, as “external” factors or “secondary qualities” irrelevant to any disciplined act of understanding, whatever cannot be abstracted, reduced, and counted. It is no longer reasonable, in particular, to abstract humans from the natural world, reduce them to self-aggrandizing egos, and then feed their doings alone into our computations. Social systems are embedded in ecosystems, humans are enmeshed in webs of interdependence with the other-than-human.Analyses, social or natural scientific, that remain indifferent to these insights are rapidly becoming unreliable, and visibly so, as descriptions of the real world. As empirical backing for moral arguments or policy decisions, these analyses are serviceable only to those who have a stake in keeping the blinders firmly secured.Menand’s analysis of neoliberalism, for example, is all numbers and people. For him, being reasonable means taking such facts as can be configured mathematically and assembling a balanced account of them. All the thirsting, wheezing, and keeling over in the street, the struggling for food and safety now being experienced by millions of people worldwide, the winking out of species – these consequences of neoliberal globalization are unmistakably real but somehow inadmissible as evidence. Menand is no doubt aware of them – who couldn’t be? – but he is constrained from factoring them in by his manner of being a reasonable intellectual. The balance he achieves by adding some downsides to a World Bank success narrative comes only after leaving the weightiest items off the scales. If the people being lifted out of poverty are at the same time, and by action of the same press of circumstances, being lowered into their graves, that is probably a fact worth noting.The scientists are well aware of ecosystems and non-humans. But they too are duty-bound to appear reasonable. The manner in which they do so affirms the foresight of those who etched into the founding tablets of modern science a commandment never to mix facts and values. In private, climate scientists confess to being scared shitless by what their most trustworthy empirical projections suggest is awaiting us just around the bend (for this side of the story, see the interview with climate scientist Bill McGuire in the 07/30/2022 Guardian). When facing the public, professional etiquette requires that they adopt a “just the facts, ma’am” demeanor. Those few who violate that code and speak their fears as responsible moral actors are chastised in the media and, often, in the academic journals for tarnishing the hallowed objectivity of science.The facts do speak, but from beneath such a thick overlay of well-mannered reasonableness that only the scientists themselves can catch their true import. With rare exception, they are not sharing with us what those facts say to them. This institutionalized cautiousness infects their sense of what we should consider normal and of how – at what rate, along which dimensions – we should expect things to deviate from that norm in the future. Their fears find no purchase in such calculations, surfacing only over drinks or in bed after the work of science is done.I recently sat in on a conference panel where two well-informed observers traded speculations about what the future might hold. The social scientist had authored a book which, it was argued, had influenced some of the thinking and language in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Her vision of the future teems with solar panels, batteries on wheels, and windmills – our tickets, if we would just invest in them, to “sustainability.” The other panelist, a science fiction writer who had woven climate change into the plotline of a best-selling novel, seconded her enthusiasm for all-out electrification. An audience member wondered what we should make of the same administration’s approval of the Willow project in Alaska and its decision to remove any legal barriers local residents had been using, out of desperation, to obstruct completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. The science fiction writer argued that just because the drilling infrastructure is built, we shouldn’t assume any oil will actually be pumped out of the ground and burned. Perhaps there is a deeper, strategic logic to the approval of Willow. Sensing perhaps the astonishment that lit up some faces in my vicinity at least, he then informed us that there are some amazing young people working on energy policy in the Biden Administration. I doubt that I was alone in my inability to find this reassuring, but it seemed to do the job for the panelists. They then went on the offensive, invoking “the narcissism of small differences” as a way to understand the complaints of those who do not share either their confidence that right-thinking young people will be shaping policy from lowly positions in the Department of Energy or their faith in the wisdom of the “electrify everything’ agenda altogether. Skeptics, apparently, will have to pay for some therapy before that wisdom can sink in.That exchange gives us a glimpse into how most progressives and environmentalists are now drawing the line between reasonable and unreasonable in the matter of new drilling projects and pipelines. Another glimpse was provided by a keynote speaker at the same conference. Billed as a “visionary green entrepreneur,” he floated point-clinching charts and breezy rhetoric above the stage to ornament a case for full tilt electrification. He was favorably received.This speaker handled in three ways the argument that all the mining, manufacturing, and transport required to affect a transition to green energy would have an environmental impact as devastating as the fossil fuel economy has had. At the outset of his talk, he said with mock exasperation that “yes, we are going to have to dig some holes in the ground.” Like the anti-narcissists, he claimed the real world as his domain and chided the mass electrification skeptics for their refusal to live in it.
A bit later he flashed a chart with different sized circles designed to contrast the amount of coal, gas, and oil we now use to power our economy with the amount of what he called “transition metals” (most prominently lithium, cobalt, and nickel, along with aluminum and steel at the end of the list) that would be consumed in a green economy. The circles for the fossil fuels (figures were from 2019) were huge, as one might expect, visually dominating the chart. There were two circles for the transition metals, both quite puny by comparison, which was the point of the graphic. The first represented the amount of these metals consumed in 2020, its puniness attributable to the fact that the transition had only begun. The second circle represented the same variable for 2050 – a projection based on what somebody had calculated all this might amount to at the end of the transition.
His third tactic for handling the skepticism he knew to be festering in audiences like this was to pin it all on the fossil fuel companies. Like the cigarette makers of yore, the bad guys in this story were muddying the waters so they could keep their product burning at full volume into the future. The implication seemed to be that if you were experiencing any of this skepticism you were being duped by industry propaganda. It was not reason but partisan skullduggery that was prompting your misgivings about the green energy script.
Call me a narcissist if you must, but my misgivings arose from my own reading around in these issues and they were not being quelled by this presentation. I balked at the size of the 2050 circle – is it really possible to calculate, from where we sit now, all the materials a fully green economy would consume? Given the scale of this construction project and the unknowns sure to crop up along the way, an estimate made a quarter century before completion is bound to be an underestimation – most likely a sizable one. And were these calculations inflected in any way by a partisanship, opposed to that of the fossil fuel propagandists but in play nonetheless, that I should worry about? Early in the presentation the speaker had flashed a chart showing that “total energy-related CO2 emissions” had peaked and were trending steadily downward. He urged the audience to take pride in what had been accomplished and cautioned that we not grow complacent, as if the hard work of transition might be behind us. That was puzzling. If one consults any available graph for total CO2 emissions, one will discover that they continue to trend upwards. This fact has been widely reported and causes much consternation among those alarmed by climate change. I do not know what had to be excluded from consideration to get the downward-trending graph – i.e., exactly how “total energy-related CO2 emissions” differs from “total CO2 emissions” – but it was apparent that the speaker had selected the celebratory numbers so we might feel that we were on the right road and just needed to do more of what we were already doing in the way of sustainability to get things fully under control. The maneuver called to mind the factors Menand left out of his review of neoliberalism and, for me, drained the last bit of credibility out of the teeny 2050 “transition metals” circle.
The costs of digging some holes in the ground become more tangible if we visit a place where that is already underway. A New York Times correspondent recently (08/18/2023) filed a report on a Chinese mining facility in Indonesia, which has some of the world’s largest deposits of nickel. Chinese investors wanted to mine and smelt this critical “transition metal” (needed in batteries for electric vehicles) offshore so the operation would not add to the already poor air quality of most Chinese cities. The project proved a boon for local merchants who service the thousands of workers drawn to the site but every other impact was devastating. An aerial photograph of the site looks eerily like those taken of the Athabascan tar sands in western Canada – a lunar landscape of total ecological destruction. Pools of toxic waste nestle up against farmland. Those who make their living from agriculture – who, in the reporter’s phrase, “coaxed crops from the soil,” as if they were the ones out of synch with nature here – voiced sharp opposition to the project, as one would expect. Locals don masks on bad days; health clinics are full of people reporting lung ailments. Hours at the smelter are long, working conditions are horrendous, deadly accidents are commonplace. Non-native workers often find that their visas have been confiscated; a disturbing number choose suicide as their only avenue of escape. They wear helmets that signal by color their rank in the job hierarchy – yellow for those on the bottom, red, blue, and white for the workers and supervisors tiered by category above them. Nearly all the yellow helmets are worn by Indonesians, the rest by Chinese. The immigrant Chinese are sometimes prohibited from leaving the vicinity of their barracks lest the mere sight of them fan the animosity of native Indonesians into violence. Protests against the pollution and the caste labor system have been brutally suppressed by police and, when necessary, Indonesian army units.
Conditions such as these were not represented in the green visionary’s cost-of-transition circles. The mathematical representations diverted our attention from such realities as could be observed by the naked eye and invested our hopes in the very development – a growing “green economy” – that brought those conditions into being. This maneuver transported the discussion to a place beyond the reach of moral judgment. Anything that might provoke outrage – what most of us feel when we read about such things – had to be excluded so that the work of empirical calculation could proceed unsullied by any outpouring of empathy. Beyond that, these are just some holes in the ground. Rabbits and groundhogs, whom we tolerate, dig them too.
Also visible at the site, but buried within his math, were the energy sources that undermine the green visionary’s “we’ve bent the curve, people” cheeriness. Along with millions of tons of mined nickel spilled across the Sulawesi landscape, the reporter observed a “structure the size of several airplane hangars [holding] mountains of coal waiting to be fed into the park’s power plant to generate electricity.” Of course he did. All the major components of the “green economy” – windmills, photovoltaic cells, EV batteries – require fossil fuels for their production.
China licenses two new coal-fired electricity-generating plants a week to power its manufacturing facilities, including the ones that make those components. That is why CO2 emissions continue to rise with the numbers for renewable energy usage. As the fossil fuel companies are well aware, it is an integrated system. The economy envisioned by “green growth” enthusiasts, with its carbon capture scams and electrify everything fantasies, gives those companies a new lease on life. If they are to be put down, it will be by other means.
The reporter placed Jamal, a construction worker hired to build dormitories to accommodate the influx of smelter workers, at the center of his story. He had boosted his income by building a few rental units of his own and used that money to put tile on his floors and an air conditioner in his house. The “crux” of the matter, which the reporter derived from Jamal’s situation, was the trade-off Indonesians seemed willing to accept – “pollution and social strife for social mobility.” As Jamal put it, “the air is not good but we have better living standards.”
That does get us to the heart of things, although not in the way Jamal or the reporter imagines.
Notice that air quality is not perceived to be a component of living standards. The ecological and economic values are segregated, calculated separately, and then thrown on the scales to achieve the unhappy balance that marks the arrival of a reasonable conclusion. It mimics exactly Menand’s analysis of neoliberalism and every other account you will find online about nickel mining in Indonesia or, indeed, the mining and manufacture of anything needed for the “green transition.” The script is classically tragic – a lamentable situation unfolds that people, the reasonable ones at least, must accept as their share of a fated outcome.
So we look away from the holes in the ground and carry on, sadder perhaps but wiser. We collect data and mind our business. We add well-trained voices to those tasked with prettifying an administration which is building out the infrastructure for fossil fuel production faster and bigger than anybody. We applaud glitzy, upbeat presentations that assure us we can keep the consumer extravaganza going with batteries and solar panels. Nothing seems to shake our faith in the righteousness of that extravaganza, even as we are beset at every turn, in our communities and our homes, by despair and unhappiness.
There are plenty of bad actors in this story but rest assured that I am not placing anyone I have refenced here in that category. The explanations and projections of these observers fall short, as I see it, because they are coming at things with a stock of assumptions that is being depleted along with everything else. The intellectual climate, too, has grown chaotic. More precisely, a fissure has opened up between two ways of being reasonable. The old one, in place since the scientific revolution and on display in the arguments I have reviewed, is showing itself to be inadequate to the challenges – to reliable comprehension and sensible conduct – we now face. But a new one has arisen to supplant it. Those who nudged me in a new direction are not monks scribbling away in a monastery but writers with large readerships (Braiding Sweetgrass stayed on the NYT best seller list for over two years). The commitments that bind them as a group – to holism rather than dualism; to ecological rather than reductionist approaches to the natural world; to beauty and mutuality as defining features of that world and the need to take both into account when engaging with it for any purpose; to the worth and significance of every being, not just the humans, on the scene; to the value of being rooted in a particular place if we are to live free, well, and wisely – are shared as well by the millions of ordinary folks worldwide who have never been pried loose from these commitments in the first place. Further, those aspiring to be reasonable in this way exhibit remarkable diversity in political and religious beliefs. Among them you can find reactionaries and radicals, Christians and Buddhists, animists and atheists. Established methods for sorting out and evaluating political options and spiritual possibilities, like the old way of being scientific, have been compromised by serious weather damage. They are not worthy of repair. A new mass constituency for fundamental change – the new way of reasoning made flesh – is visible amidst the blight and the rot. No member of this constituency would find it reasonable to trade clean air for cheap household items, health and justice for toys and gadgets.
Here is real cause for optimism. Here is a transition sure to reward the hopes we place in it. The change in consciousness that must happen if we are to live within the planetary limits we have so foolishly imagined we could ignore is underway. Too slowly, and as yet on too small a terrain, but it is underway.
Editor’s Note: We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Something that should be a part of common sense is somehow lost in meaning among policymakers. In this piece, Elisabeth Robson explains the concept of overshoot to explain just that. She also delves into how the major policy makers have ignored it in favor of focusing on climate change and proposing solutions of “renewable” energy. Finally, she ends with three presentations on the same topic.
Bill Rees spent a good part of his career developing a tool called the ecological footprint analysis — a measurement of our collective footprint in terms of the natural resources humans use each year and the waste products we put back into the environment. His analysis showed that humanity is well into overshoot — meaning, we are using far more resources than can be regenerated by Earth, and producing far more waste than the Earth can assimilate.
Overshoot is like having a checking account and a savings account and using not only all the money in our checking account each year, but also drawing down our savings account. Everyone knows if we spend down our savings account, eventually we’ll run out of money. In ecological terms, eventually we’ll run out of easily-extractable resources and do so much damage from the pollution we’ve created, life-as-we-know-it will cease to exist.
I don’t like using the word “resources” to describe the natural world, but it is a handy word to describe all the stuff we humans use from the natural world to keep ourselves alive and to maintain industrial civilization: whether that’s oil, trees, water, broccoli, cows, lithium, phosphorus, or the countless other materials and living beings we kill, extract, process, refine, and consume to get through each and every day and keep the global economy humming. Please know that I wince each time I write “resources” to represent living beings, ecosystems, and natural communities.
Whatever we call the stuff that fuels 8+ billion humans and the great big hungry beast that is industrial civilization, Bill’s analysis estimates our collective ecological footprint is currently running at about 1.75 Earth’s worth of it. Of course that use is unevenly distributed; as a North American, I am ashamed to say that I and my many neighbors on this continent have an ecological footprint 15–20 times bigger than the Earth could sustain if everyone lived like us. Many people on Earth still have ecological footprints far below what the Earth could sustain if everyone lived like them, so it all averages out to 1.75 Earths.
But wait! you might be saying; how can we be using more than one Earth’s worth of resources? Because we are drawing down those resources, like drawing down our savings account. Each year less is regenerated — fewer salmon and fewer trees for instance — more materials are gone forever, more toxic waste is polluting the environment. Eventually the savings account will be empty, and that’s when life-as-we-know-it ends for good.
A companion yardstick for measuring human overshoot of Earth’s carrying capacity is the planetary boundaries framework. This framework identifies nine processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of the Earth system as a whole. The framework tracks by how much we’ve transgressed beyond a safe operating space for the nine processes: climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities such as micro plastics, endocrine disruptors, and organic pollutants.
Planetary Boundaries Framework, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University
Six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, and of those, five are in the high risk zone. By far the boundary we’ve transgressed furthest is biosphere integrity — much more so than climate change. This is perhaps not surprising given that humans and our livestock make up 96% of the weight of land mammals and wildlife a mere 4%, and that the accumulated weight of all human stuff on the planet now weighs more than all living beings — flora and fauna combined — on Earth.
I’m writing this as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) 28 is wrapping up in Dubai, UAE. There was a lot of talk about climate change and fossil fuels — mostly whether we will “phase down” or “phase out” our use of fossil fuels — and about so-called “renewables.” The conference ended with a global goal to “triple renewables and double energy efficiency.”
“We acted, we delivered,” claimed COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber, as if building more industrial technologies, like wind turbines and solar panels, and making more energy efficient buildings and cars will somehow restore biosphere integrity; unpollute the water, land and air; regrow all the old-growth forests; unpave the wetlands; and reverse the 1000x-faster-than-normal rate we exterminating species on Earth.
The global focus on climate change, cemented by almost 30 years of UNFCCC conferences, has blinded the world to our true predicament — that is, ecological overshoot — of which climate change is just one of many symptoms. Organizations, governments, corporations, the media are all talking and talking about climate change and the supposed “solutions” of renewables and energy efficiency, while essentially ignoring the ongoing destruction of the natural world. I sometimes imagine them sitting around the large conference tables at the COP with their fingers in their ears singing la-la-la-la-la so as to tune out the natural world as she begs for mercy while they plan “green growth” and scheme to make sure none of the agreements will put a dent in any of their bank accounts.
Likewise, local governments, including the one where I live, are also entirely focused on climate change. Recent meetings, reports, policies, and plans in the county where I live reflect the carbon tunnel vision that is legislated from on high, including state laws mandating net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and “clean electricity” by 2045, and enforcing a market-based program to cap greenhouse gas emissions.
These state laws and others, as well as federal incentives such as the Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, put the focus squarely on carbon emissions. No other symptom of ecological overshoot has such clear cut, goal-oriented legislation as carbon emissions.
Carbon tunnel vision
Carbon tunnel vision means other problems get short shrift. And the “solutions” that corporations are selling us in order to meet the goals set by federal and state law will actually make many of the other symptoms of ecological overshoot worse. Far worse.
Imagine the hockey-stick shaped graph of growth over the past 250 years or so. It doesn’t really matter what growth you’re measuring — population, the economy, average income, fertilizer use, nitrogen runoff, copper extraction— that graph is going steeply up.
The Great Acceleration
My county’s planning documents assume that growth line will continue going up. Everywhere’s planning documents assume the same — that the economy, population, extraction, development, and consumption will continue growing. Indeed, an economy based on debt requires it for life-as-we-know-it to continue.
But this is simply not possible on a finite planet with finite resources and ecosystems already shattering under pressure. Basic laws of ecology tell us that when a species overshoots the regenerative capacity of its environment, that species will collapse. This is true for humans too. Our city, county, state, and federal policies do not reflect this reality in any way. This is shortsighted at best; a catastrophe at worst.
So why are most scientists, organizations, and governments so focused on climate change and carbon emissions? In part, because it’s relatively easy to measure. We’ve been measuring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since 1958, and many other greenhouse gases almost as long. We can see the average annual parts per million increase every year. It’s much easier to measure CO2 ppm in the atmosphere than it is to count every last frog of a given species, or detect toxic pollutants in ground water, or track the decline of top soil, or do long term studies on the impacts of pesticides and herbicides.
Another answer to that question is that corporations have created technologies and industries they can sell to the world as “solutions” to climate change. These “solutions” allow corporations and the governments they influence to believe we can continue business-as-usual. The pervasive propaganda about these “solutions” allows us regular folk to believe we can continue life-as-we-know-it without having to worry too much because “someone’s doing something about climate change.”
Unlike the “solutions” to climate change that corporations are constantly trying to sell us, there is no profitable technology that will eliminate habitat loss, species extinctions, pollution, and deforestation. And so what we hear from organizations, governments, corporations, and the media is all climate change all the time, because someone’s making bank.
To try to break through the wall of all climate change all the time, I recently hosted a series of events on ecological overshoot. I invited everyone I could think of in my county who might have influence on county policy and planning in hopes of sparking the kinds of broader conversations I wish we were having. Few of those people showed up, perhaps unsurprisingly, so it seems unlikely those conversations will happen.
However, the three presentations — by Bill Rees, Jeremy Jiménez, and Max Wilbert — are excellent and well worth sharing with the broader community of people who are trying their best to start conversations about ecological overshoot.
I hope you enjoy these presentations as much as I did, and have better luck than I have at broaching these topics with people where you live.
Editor’s note: Environmental nonprofit groups — which include land conservation, land trusts, and wildlife protection organizations — receive just 2% of all charitable donations, research suggests.Though small conservation groups are typically efficient about converting funds into effective, on-the-ground projects, most conservation funding goes to the largest, multi-national organizations.
“The simplest and most immediate way concerned parties with some resources, whether an individual or institution, can help is to donate more to small wildlife conservation organizations and volunteer when and where it is logistically possible,” a new op-ed argues. This post is a commentary by Gail Koelln.
More funds needed for small nonprofit conservation groups
I have worked as a grant writing professional for about 24 years and am also the part-time co-director of a small, U.S.-based wildlife conservation nonprofit called One Earth Conservation (OEC) that focuses on the conservation of wild parrots in the Americas. As a grant writing consultant, I serve nonprofit clients in a variety of fields, such as animal welfare, the environment, arts, youth education and development, health, and serving people with disabilities.With this unique perspective, and at a time of massive biodiversity loss, I believe it’s urgent that small and nimble wildlife conservation nonprofits receive more support. Yet, I have noted many striking things about the wildlife conservation field. It is, arguably, one of the most important issues needing attention in a world where a sixth mass extinction event is already underway.Yet, funding in this sector is pathetically paltry, with limited numbers of foundations and corporations supporting conservation as a way to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Even government funding is mostly restricted to grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and small departments within local state environmental agencies, with very few exceptions. The silver lining is that government grants can provide substantial funding that most other funders do not offer.
In addition, Allison Smith of Neon Onewrote the following about how much individuals in the U.S. donated to environmental and animal welfare organizations in 2021:
“Giving USA found that just 3% of all giving went to environmental and animal welfare organizations in 2021. Other research suggests that environmental nonprofits — which include land conservation, land trusts, and wildlife protection organizations — received about 2% of charitable donations.”
This is the second lowest percentage of giving of all categories (just above giving to individuals) that includes arts, culture, and humanities; international affairs; health; public-society benefit; grant making foundations; human services; education; and religion.
I have also noticed that there is little to no capacity building support for smaller wildlife conservation organizations, which is in sharp contrast to, for example, small arts organizations. Throughout the U.S. there are many local arts councils that provide small grants, training, and other capacity building resources in support of small arts and culture nonprofits. This type of support, whether financial or not, can help small arts groups to grow and become self-sustaining. Unfortunately, I have encountered nothing of the sort for wildlife conservation organizations such as OEC.
When funders do provide financial support for wildlife conservation, the vast majority of that funding goes to larger, more established organizations. Small groups barely stand a chance of getting even a meager grant from many funders. And government applications require a great deal of sweat and tears to complete and administer, which is more difficult for small organizations with few staff members.
Smaller wildlife conservation organizations can often be more nimble than larger organizations that usually have larger bureaucratic structures. Our impact relative to the lesser dollars we have to work with can be greater. Investing more funding into smaller wildlife conservation organizations can result in a greater “bang for the buck.”
Using OEC as an example, it is important to know that wild parrots are native to five continents and they even live wild in Europe and the U.S. as introduced species. If expanded, OEC’s community conservation work could positively impact biodiversity loss globally. Our projects not only help reduce the illegal wildlife trade and habitat loss, but also improve animal welfare and empower Indigenous and other marginalized communities. With an annual budget of about $240,000, OEC currently partners with local people in six countries in the Americas.
Rev. Dr. LoraKim Joyner, the other co-director of OEC, says, “It doesn’t take much capital to invest in social capital. It’s an infinite resource that keeps giving across generations, cultures, and species.” Our emotional, social, and organizational intelligence trainings are infused with conservation theory. Implementation of what they learn inspires participants to not only want to protect their parrots, but also other wildlife and their environment, and poachers are transforming into protectors.
We have been testing for three years novel, online Parrot Conservation Corps (PCC) trainings in English and Spanish to teach our conservation methods and create mini teams to sprout new projects. Our most recent PCC engaged new leaders in eight countries and provided them with small grants for their projects and stipends when their work was completed. We have found the PCC to be a very nimble way to influence large swaths of people and seed new conservationists and projects. These activities can be replicated by reaching out to more communities, co-organizing new PCC cohorts, and training other NGOs on our process.
We often dream about what we could do with a larger budget, as many small nonprofits do, and I know we would benefit greatly from capacity building support in areas such as tracking financial transactions in the field where there is erratic internet access. If humanity wants to preserve and restore biodiversity globally, then looking to and supporting wildlife conservation organizations of all sizes is a large part of the answer. It remains an open question how to best change the global funding paradigm for nonprofits in general, as it isn’t working well in many fields, not only in wildlife conservation. I don’t claim to have the answer, but at least I can encourage more of us to discuss the possibilities.
In the meantime, the simplest and most immediate way concerned parties with some resources, whether an individual or institution, can help is to donate more to small wildlife conservation organizations and volunteer when and where it is logistically possible. OEC is doing our part by working daily to increase the capacity of our partners on the ground in the countries in which we work. As we support them financially, we also regularly provide guidance and training to strengthen their ability to eventually continue their community conservation work on their own. Ultimately, that is the best hope for staunching the open wound of mass extinctions on Earth.
Editor’s Note: Ecopsychology emerged in early 1990’s as a beacon of hope for biocentrism. Unlike environmental psychology that looks at human psychology in the context of environment, ecopsychology looks at human psychology as part of and intricately connected to the Earth. It is based on the assumption that human mental wellbeing is related to planetary wellbeing. It highlights our interconnection with, not just other humans, but with the Earth and all other nonhumans.
After three decades of the emergence of the field, that hope has nearly diminished. While it has successfully introduced biocentrism to many, it has not been as successful in bringing material changes in the status of the natural world.
This article was originally published by Will Falk in early 2017. It is a call for radicalizing ecopsychology, for emerging ecopsychologists to go beyong changing “one heart at a time” to bringing material changes in the natural world to ensure planetary and human (and nonhuman) wellbeing.
I do not remember the first time I saw my mother’s face, though I know she remembers the first time she saw mine. It was the very beginning of my life, my birth. I do not remember the first time I saw my mother’s face, but, I do remember the first time I saw my mother’s face at what would have been the end of my life after I tried to kill myself.
This is what I’m thinking about as I hold my fifteen-month-old baby nephew Thomas while he falls asleep.
A soft darkness blankets the room. The curtains are tied back on either side of the room’s only window and the night pours in. A wet snow falls with the starlight in a sprinkling of silver and gray. A few nights before full and the moon is strong. Shadows flicker on the floor below the window. A pine whispers outside where the wind brushes powder from her branches.
His head is nestled between my chest and shoulder. I lean back into a wide chair, careful not to let my elbow bump the armrest and jostle Thomas’ little head. Thomas’ eyes are open as he watches the snow fall with me. In the spaces between the clouds, the sky is revealed as a deep blue. The moon’s glow gently pulls the blue down where it settles as the same color in Thomas’ eyes.
The snow sets a contemplative rhythm. As the flakes grow and the snow slows, Thomas’ eyelids become heavier until his eyes no longer stay open. I cannot decide whose rest is more peaceful: Thomas’ or the snow’s. In the stillness, holding Thomas close, I feel two heartbeats. Mine is slower and heavier, while Thomas’ is gentler, quicker. Once in a while, the beats sync together and it feels like a chord plucked far away strikes us gently, runs through us, and echoes on.
Outside, the falling temperature is indicated by fog growing on the corners of the window. Inside, I feel the familiar warmth that grows in my chest whenever I hold Thomas. It’s not just Thomas’ small heat emanating through his pajamas and his favorite blanket into my body.
The warmth’s source is gratitude. Holding Thomas like this, listening to the smallness of his breaths and the gentleness of his heartbeat, I recognize the way Thomas is wholly dependent on those who love him for his life. First, his body was nurtured for nine months in his mother’s body. After his birth, he required his mother’s milk for sustenance. As he grows, he needs his mother, his father, and all those who love him to feed him, to clothe and bathe him, to provide shelter, to attend to any illness he experiences, and to make sure he has hands to fall into now that he climbs everything his strength will allow. Right now, he needs me to provide his nightly bottle, to hold him close and steady as he falls asleep, and then to lay him down in his crib.
Thomas teaches me about my own dependence. The warmth I experience holding Thomas bonds me to him. This connection makes threats to his well-being threats to my own. If he is hurt, I will be hurt, too. Feeling this warmth and understanding the connection forming, I feel I am participating in an ancient emotional ritual. One of the circles of life is completed in this experience. I know, now, what my mother must have felt holding me. The humility in the feeling is staggering.
I wish nothing would ever disturb this little creature asleep in my arms. I wish he could live his whole life laughing like he does when his hands find a new texture they’ve never experienced before. I wish he could live his whole life the way he dances in a style completely lacking self-consciousness anytime music becomes audible. I wish he could live his whole life confident that a loved one will envelop him in a sincere embrace whenever he reaches out for one.
There is horror in my wish. I know no one who has ever loved a child could guarantee the child’s total safety. But, in today’s world where we are poisoning our water, making our air nearly unbreathable, burning our soil at dizzying paces, and irreversibly altering our climate, children born today may find their homes unlivable when they reach my age. In fact, generations of children born in the colonies and sacrifice zones have already found their homes unlivable.
I think back to the worst two days of my life. They weren’t the two days I tried to kill myself. They were the two days after when I sat across from my mother, trying to meet the sky’s dusk blue in her eyes, while I explained to the woman who sacrificed so much to give me life why there was nothing more she could have done to prevent me from trying to take that life.
While I am holding Thomas, I cannot stop the visions of his future from forming. Feeling the love I feel for him right now, I cannot imagine the pain I would feel if he sat across from me, head bent under the invisible weight of despair, as he explained how there was nothing I could have done to stop the major depression he experiences. And in my memories of my mother and visions of Thomas’ potential future, I recognize the truth: Even if we succeed in keeping our children physically safe, in this time of ecological collapse we cannot shield their souls from the psychological effects of the destruction.
***
We live in a hell where our very experience is being destroyed.
Ecopsychology was supposed to lead us out of this hell. It was going to do this by bringing together ecology and psychology to attack the illusion that we are fundamentally isolated from each other, the natural world, and ourselves. Theodore Roszak cites a 1990 conference held at the Harvard-based Center for Psychology and Social Change entitled “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered” as one of the seminal events in the new ecopsychology movement. The ecopsychologists gathered there summed up one of ecopsychology’s defining goals: “if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction.”
A few years later, in 1995, the term “ecopsychology” entered the popular lexicon with the publication of a collection of writing by psychologists, deep ecologists, and environmental activists titled, “Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind.” In what would become a foundational text in ecopsychology, Lester R. Brown, author and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, provided an introductory piece, “Ecopsychology and the Environmental Revolution: An Environmental Foreword.”
Brown’s excitement was so high, he predicted “a coming environmental revolution” and wrote, “Ecopsychologists…believe it is time for the environmental movement to file… a ‘psychological impact statement’. In practical political terms that means asking: are we being effective? Most obviously, we need to ask that question with respect to our impact on the public, whose hearts and minds we want to win over. The stakes are high and time is short.”
If we use the 1990 conference as a beginning, ecopsychology has had 27 years to teach “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered.” It has had 27 years to answer Brown’s question, “are we being effective?” It has had 27 years to win over the hearts and minds of the public. And, the stakes are only higher, time is only shorter.
Ecopsychology has failed. Ecologically, the diversity of life around the world is worse off with the rate of species extinction only intensifying in recent years. Psychologically, the rate of mental illness is even worse than in the 90s. And, as far as the “hearts and minds of the public”? Well, close to 63 million Americans just elected a climate change denier to the most powerful political position in the world.
Ecopsychology’s failure stems from an unwillingness to carry the material implications of the very insights ecopsychologists have made to these implications’ logical conclusion. These insights can be distilled into a few, potent premises.
***
I. The human mind originates in its experiences of its environment. In other words, the human mind is experiences of environment.
What do I mean by “environment”? For my purposes, the environment is the sum of all relationships, conscious and unconscious, physical, emotional, and spiritual, creating our lives.
Some of these relationships are as obvious as the sun’s heat, the moon’s pull, and the stars’ mysteries. Some of these relationships need no explanation: the nearness of your lover’s body, the taste of ripe blackberries, the sound of an elk bugle over the next ridgeline at dusk. Some of these relationships are as widely-studied as our dependence on our mothers’ bodies in the earliest stages of our development, as the dominance abusers gain over the abused, and as the influence modern advertising has on our desires. Some of these relationships – like the ones lost with the disappearance of hundreds of species daily, like the disintegration of connections with our ancestors, like the inability to make any sense of our dreams – have been ignored by the dominant culture for far too long.
One of the defining characteristics of ecopsychology, is a rejection of Descartes’ “I think, therefore, I am.” Ecology, recognizing that life is sustained by countless connections between living beings, replaces Descartes’ statement with “We relate, therefore, we are.” James Hillman articulates this rejection as a demonstration of the “the arbitrariness of the cut between ‘me’ and ‘not me’” that has dominated civilized thought for the past 4 centuries.
Out of this rejection comes the necessity for what Anita Burrows calls an “expanded view of self.” Drawing on her clinical experience with children, in her essay “The Ecopsychology of Child Development” Burrows argues, “If we see the child inextricably connected not only to her family, but to all living things and to the earth itself, then our conception of her as an individual, and of the family and social systems in which she finds herself, must expand.”
It is here that we first encounter implications that ecopsychology has proven unwilling to respond to. What do we find when we expand our vision of self to include “all living things and to the earth itself”? We find all living things under attack and the earth threatened with total collapse.
***
II. Human behavior originates in the human mind. So, human behavior originates in experiences of environment.
The origination of human behavior in the mind is neither new nor controversial. The origination of human behavior in experiences of environment is also largely accepted in mainstream psychology as long as that environment is limited to human social interaction.
Radical psychologist R.D. Laing, whose work brilliantly describes the alienation infecting Western humanity, succinctly explains the situation in his work The Politics of Experience, “Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.” Laing illustrates the importance of human relationships in our conception of self, “Men can and do destroy the humanity of other men, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways.”
Laing, for all his wisdom, examines only a small part of the environment producing the human mind. We can correct his vision and come to a deeper understanding of the human psyche if we accept the definition of “environment” I created above. Expanding Laing’s conception of self, we can re-write his analysis as: Humans can and do destroy the relationships sustaining life, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent on countless connections. The natural world, which includes us, is both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by the totality of these connections. Our environment, whether it is a healthy natural community or an artificial human one, acts upon others to affect them in different ways.
***
III. Changes in experiences of environment lead to changes in human behavior. Healthy experiences of environment produce healthy behavior. Unhealthy experiences of environment produce unhealthy behavior.
This premise is Paul Shepard’s thesis in Nature and Madness. Beginning with the question, “Why does society persist in destroying its habitat?”, Shepard blames the physical destruction wrought by civilization and the way this destruction influences human ontogeny. A primary strength of Shepard’s analysis is the way he removes human destructiveness from abstractions like greed or evil and places them in concrete processes like biological development. In doing so, he robs those who blame human nature for the destruction of the planet of their excuse for inaction. He also pulls the rug from under ardent liberals who claim we need transformations of human hearts and that the best way to achieve these transformations is through therapy, education, and one-heart-at-a-time crusades.
Shepard blames the knowledge and human organization developed by civilization claiming it “wrenched the ancient social machinery that limited human births” and that “it fostered a new sense of human mastery and the extirpation of non-human life.” This resulted in not just psychopathic individuals, but in psychopathic cultures. Psychopathic cultures produce psychopathic individuals who, in Shepard’s words, heedlessly occupy “all earth habitats,” who physically and chemically “abuse the soil, air, and water,” who cause “the extinction and displacement of wild plants and animals,” and who practice “overcutting and overgrazing of forest and grasslands.”
Healthy human behavior, for Shepard, will only be achieved, then, by a return to the global existence of human hunter-gatherer societies. In doing so, we will return to a way of life in “which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things.”
***
IV. Human behavior is destroying the environment. Destroying the environment produces unhealthy experiences of the environment which, in turn, produce unhealthy human behavior.
I am writing this looking out the glass windows of a coffee shop separating me from the reality of a -8 degrees Fahrenheit temperature in Park City, Utah. I can see the digital numbers on the coffee shop’s thermostat: 73 degrees.
I consider what lets me sit here, in comfort, while ten feet away, on the other side of the window, the air would cause the skin on my knuckles to crack and bleed. The energy required to keep this room warm is produced by burning a combination of natural gas sucked from beneath the earth’s surface where it played an integral role in forming the earth’s skin and coal formed by the decomposing remains of ancient forests ripped from wounds in the land. The combustion of the natural gas and coal produces great heat, but it also produces poisonous fumes that trap the earth’s heat in and melt polar ice caps, disturb rain patterns, contribute to species extinction, and threaten life with total collapse.
The glass, wood, aluminum, and steel that forms the wall between reality and me, and holds the warmth in, also allows me to focus my attention on the artificiality of my computer screen. For most of the morning, I am unaware of the gold flickering with the communion of the winter sun on frozen pine branches. I do not see the crystal purity of the cold blue sky. I cannot rejoice in the magic moment water freezes in mid-air to sparkle in a twisting sheen with the breeze.
I am also ignorant in the warning pain caused by cold. Without the sacrifice of the gas and coal, without the theft of the wood and minerals needed for the glass, maybe Winter’s voice would be too stern to withstand. Maybe, the cold is a command to humans to forsake the heights where the region’s pure waters collect. Maybe, the chill is telling us we are too clumsy, too awkward not to foul the waters that will support all of life here through the spring, summer, and fall.
In short, the destruction that produces my comfort allows my narcissism and encourages my apathy, while I continue to contribute to the destruction.
***
V. The cycle of violence perpetuates itself over generations and intensifies as unhealthy experiences of environment become the norm for most humans.
Freud asked, “If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations – or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become neurotic?”
It is not the “whole of mankind” that has become neurotic because there exist, and always have existed, original peoples who live in balance with their land bases. But, civilization itself, is insane. Derrick Jensen defines civilization as “a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.”
Civilization is insane because the civilized strip their land bases of the physical possibility of life. As civilization spreads, it leaves an ever-widening circle of destruction. The human minds that develop in this circle of destruction, have had their experience destroyed, and carry their destruction with them to destroy more lands. Each successive generation exists on lands more impoverished than the preceding generations experienced. The environmental catastrophe confronting us is the result of this insane cycle.
***
VI. The environment is finite. Eventually, humans will destroy the possibility of experiences of environment.
The relationships creating our lives can be diminished. Loved ones die, rivers run dry, mountaintops removed, and species lost forever. While this process intensifies, the first thing that happens is the diversity of our relationships is destroyed. To borrow Richard Louv’s phrase, we begin to suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.” As humans proliferate and “heedlessly occupy all earth habitats,” most human relationships become relationships with other humans.
R.D. Laing wrote, “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.” If we expand Laing’s definition of “experience” to include non-human relationships, then we begin to see that not only is our experience destroyed, but the very possibility of experience is threatened.
The material world makes experience possible. Quite simply, without flesh to compose our bodies and brains, without water to carry nutrients to our bodies and brains, without minerals to facilitate electrical impulses, we cannot experience. As we destroy more topsoil, irreversibly alter the climate, and poison the world’s water supplies, we come ever closer to the moment flesh cannot grow, water is transformed from life-giver to death-bringer, and minerals are all trapped in steel beams rusting where they collapsed under civilization’s gluttonous weight.
***
VII. We must change human behavior. To change human behavior we must change human experiences of environment.
Medicine tells us that prevention is better than cure. And, eradication of illness is the ultimate prevention. Ecopsychology provides the map for the eradication of the psychopathology currently affecting civilized culture. If we want to prevent this psychopathology from infecting and destroying future generations of human and non-human life, we need to fundamentally alter the sick, disappearing, human-centric environments human minds are currently formed in. We must physically dismantle civilization to give the natural world a chance to heal and truly sustainable human cultures to thrive across the planet once more.
I’ve written several essays, now, making this same point and I’ve received a lot of feedback. Few people disagree with me, but I’ve been very disheartened to learn that many of my readers take my call to dismantle civilization as essentially an internal process. I’ve had writers tell me we need to “re-wild our minds” (as if that is possible without re-wilding the environments producing our minds), we need to grieve planetary and species’ destruction (and while we are grieving more of the planet is destroyed and more species lost which will, I assume, also need to be grieved creating a never-ending cycle of grief), and I’ve even been invited to live in a commune, off-the-grid in South America.
But, civilization is not a mental event. Civilization is a global, physical process that is destroying the planet. While it is producing climate change, ocean acidification, massive deforestation and desertification, there is nowhere to escape.
Unfortunately, too many students of ecopsychology who recognize this, instead of facing the need to physically dismantle the systems causing this collapse, too often retreat to the position that only personal therapy is possible and that the planet can only be saved by curing one mind at a time.
How can James Hillman who has provided so much insight, for example, write: “Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.” And, then, literally in the very next sentence write, “I write this appeal not so much to ‘save the planet’ or to enjoin my fellow therapists to retrain as environmentalists…My concern is also most specifically for psychotherapy…”?
How can Terrance O’Connor, practicing psychologist, narrate a story in which he answers the question “Why should we want mature relationships?” at a conference for divorced people with an outburst that included these statements: “The status quo is that the planet is dying!…healthy relationships are not an esoteric goal. It is a matter of our very survival and the survival of most of life upon this earth” and, then conclude his essay with “What is the responsibility of a therapist on a dying planet? Physician, heal thyself”?
The answer is found in the strength of the very ideology ecopsychology seeks to undermine. Planetary destruction is reduced to an ailment in individual human minds. While ecopsychology wisely recognizes that the human mind is formed by material relationships and that physical threats to these material relationships are physical threats to the human mind, when ecopsychologists concern themselves primarily with psychotherapy they contribute very little to the effort to prevent psychopathology. Ecological psychotherapy, as a practice to heal mentally ill individuals, is merely a band-aid over a gunshot wound.
The natural world does not need more ecotherapists, it needs ecomilitants. It needs strategic, organized resistance to civilization. I say this as someone whose life has been saved by ecotherapy. My life and the lives of those lucky few privileged enough to gain access to ecotherapy are nothing compared to annihilation of life on Earth. If we do not concentrate all our efforts at physically toppling the systems destroying the planet, no amount of therapy is going to save us.
I recall the starlight on Thomas’ peacefully sleeping face. I don’t want my nephew to experience the illnesses causing someone to seek the services of a therapist – ecological or otherwise. I want him to live in a world where the physical richness of his experience guarantees his healthy psychological development. I want him to live in a world that isn’t being destroyed.
Editor’s Note: Technology has created a virtual lifespace for all: a lifespace that gives us calculated doses of dopamine and gets us addicted to it. The following piece urges us to remove ourselves from the technological world that we have unwittingly been entangled into and to place ourselves within the natural, real world.
Praise the Technology!
By Mankh
89% of Americans say they check their phones within the first 10 minutes of waking up.
75% of Americans feel uneasy leaving their phone at home.
75% use their phone on the toilet.
69% have texted someone in the same room as them before.
60% sleep with their phone at night
57% consider themselves “addicted” to their phones
55% say that they have never gone longer than 24 hours without their cell phone.
47% of people say they feel a sense of panic or anxiety when their cell phone battery goes below 20%.
After a Hewlett-Packard BIOS update fried my computer’s motherboard I had four-and-a-half days without a computer while the part was in transit to the neighborhood repair guy I found because of guidance in a dream from a Carolina Wren reminding me to look local; then Internet via cell phone helped find the repair guy.
The night before I had decided to go to Best Buy’s Geek Squad, and later on learned that they typically don’t replace motherboards.
I am not much adept with cell phone internet usage so without the habitual computer checking of email and news-hounding web-searching, I wondered: What is that habit, that urge, that compulsion that has so many people hooked to their gadgets?…hooked as if the gadget is the Oracle of Delphi and everyone doesn’t have a clue what’s going on or what the future will bring UNTIL they beseech the high priestess of technology.
Various online stats indicate that people check their phones anywhere from every three to twelve minutes! Without doing that, what else is there to check, to tune-in to?
How about: the natural world, meaningful symbols, mental exercises, deep listening, dreams, to name but a few.
Perhaps people too-often feel something lacking or the need to feel complete by having interacted with someone, or a message, news article, video, or game. Normal urges yet when obsessively habitual, I venture to say that there is the searching for such a tech moment so as to save one’s self.
But save one’s self from what? Boredom?
Or to riff the old saying attributed to Socrates, the examined life which makes life worth living?
In that case, the gadget becomes a lazy savior, but not an individual savior rather a conveyor of little techno savior moments which while temporarily satisfying, the feeling doesn’t last long so one must check the gadget again for another little savior moment, and again.
Some of the hooks of this religion of technology are: the promises put forth by the advertising merchants of veneer from their pixel pulpits; keeping up with the corporate news sports-style coverage of “perpetual war for perpetual peace,” as historian Charles A. Beard phrased it; an incessant need to be in communication with human beings, at the neglect of the non-human beings.
Little techno savior moments also lean toward mechanical, robotic and unemotional forms of communication, well, except for emojis and exclamation points!!!!!
(wow! he-she-they must really omg like me!!!!!)
Yet here I am scribbling with pen and paper looking forward to my computer’s born-again status so that I may type and share this missive with whomever may happen to read it.
Ay, there’s the rub, the to tech or not to tech rub . . . or how much to tech.
I can’t begin to address the big picture of technology usage as it is the backbone of global and local business transactions, plus personal interfacing, whether you can touch the face or not. So I simply address the consciousness of the usage as I see it playing out in society at large.
Little techno savior seekers move in lockstep with their electronic marching orders of selected, scripted, distorted or outright lies news-feeds; shop till you reach the top of social status clicks; assuage deep-rooted personal insecurities by amassing more ‘likes.’
Yet in the AI world, even the concept of a savior has been depersonalized and reduced to a drive-thru fast-food fleeting moment.
I propose that how we use the gadgets is one starting point for re-evaluation, the how being the consciousness with which we use them and a weighing of what we are not using enough: our feet, our hearts, our minds, dreams, intuitions, hunches, meditations, messages from our so-called neighbor the natural world and how those messages intertwine with the dreaming time that is beyond time, beyond rational thought, beyond click and ye shall find.
The good news is that all that good stuff is readily available inside you and outside your window if you’re willing to work for it, work as hard as a child working in an underground mine in the Congo for cobalt so you can have the facility to send an emoji that a new day is dawning.
And by “work” I don’t mean job for money rather the discipline and receptivity to serving something bigger than your ego, something bigger than appeasing your momentary fancy of a feel-good hook.
Bob Dylan sings in “My Back Pages”:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach…
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now.”
And so I must dismiss any notion that this scribbling will save anyone, though I would like to think that it may tilt the scale of consciousness so that more people will be able to save themselves.
After four-and-a-half days with minimal gadget use, I am reminded that it is a tool and the manner in which humanity produces and uses such tools will determine their functionality or lack there of, with ever the questions: At what cost to habitats where massive mining occurs; at what cost to the well-being of the workers, too-often slave laborers; at what cost to one’s self and the natural world for the lack of selfless service to that very world?
In his book The Religion of Technology, David F. Noble cites technology as often spurred by a “masculine millenarian mentality,” often exhibited with the military and science frame of mind, along with a sense of religious redemption. Yet this sense of redemption is deceptively foolhardy.
According to J. D. Bernal, quoted in the book:
“The cardinal tendency of progress is the replacement of an indifferent chance environment by a deliberately created one. As time goes on, the acceptance, the appreciation, even the understanding of nature, will be less and less needed. In its place will come the need to determine the desirable form of the humanly controlled universe.” (p. 175)
What this boils down to is if we as a species go the route of playing materialistic God . . . or are willing to play along with and be played by the Earth and the spiritual energies above and within Her.
While perhaps too cute or quaint or unbelievable to some human beings, the likes of little Carolina Wrens can show the way. But such guidance can not be bought rather is the fruit of relationship, as for many years I have put and let stay up undecorated holiday wreaths on my patio, keep them up even when they have dried from scented fresh woods green to brown.
Why? Because the wrens often sleep and, while I can’t scientifically prove it, dream in them.
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a verbiage experiencer, in other words, he’s into etymology, writes about his experiences and to encourage people to learn from direct experiences, not just head knowledge.
He writes, small press publishes, and is the author of 17 books. Mankh travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island and the cycles of the Seasons. His works can be found here. You can also find this article on his blog post.
