The future will be green… or black. (4 of 4)
A down-to-earth vision of how to avoid the worst
***THIS IS PART IV OF IV***
Click to go to Part I, Part II, or Part III
The world we know is falling apart. It is being torn apart, in fact, by us modern humans and our improvidence. Reading the newspaper, watching the news, or simply walking through a town these days easily awakes this feeling us. Climate breakdown is devastating the planet, wildlife disappears at ever-increasing rates, and social polarization and the worldwide trend towards political authoritarianism sets the stage for civil unrest or even war.
The underlying problem and the most existential threat we face today is the annihilation of ecosystems through destruction and pollution. This massive anthropogenic disruption causes unprecedented global warming and a myriad of other accompanying problems, such as the Sixth Mass Extinction Event, the degradation of ecosystems and the concomitant food insecurities and social instability, and soaring inequality.
The situation is so dire that some scholars start concluding that it is too late, and that nothing can be done anyway. Climate breakdown, despite being ‘fought’, ‘battled’, and ‘combatted’ by the public for decades, is raging on at breakneck speed and is now considered ‘out of control’ and ‘unstoppable’.
Renewables won’t save us, technology won’t save us, and it is fairly realistic that even our worst-case scenarios might be true and the Earth will turn into a hothouse. Despite all our recycling, reduced meat consumption, cycling, and showering, CO2 emissions continue to rise, more oil is being extracted and burned, more species go extinct, more forests are being razed, and more rivers polluted year after year.
We pass threshold after threshold, yet nothing happens to change our course towards extinction. Public mood slowly shifts towards desperate- and hopelessness.
To find a way out of the mess we’ve created, four questions are of utmost importance:
1. Who is responsible for this ecological crisis?
2. What does ‘living sustainable’ even mean?
3. What the hell do we do about all those problems?
4. And, more importantly, how do we do this?
In the following, I will attempt to answer those fundamental questions from my own perspective and knowledge, and draw up a rough draft of one (but not the one) possible solution, or at least a direction. I don’t consider myself an expert of any kind — I’m just a man who loves his natural habitat — and I am fully aware that my proposals are still sketchy and fragmentary — but I feel like time is running out fast. Our situation has no precedent in history, so we’ll just have to try what works, and how. If we have a vaguely defined goal (which is what I’m trying to outline in the following chapters), we can just start working towards that head over heels and figure out the exact methods in the process. If we just stick to a few basic principles, the range for failure is limited to a minimum. There is no time to lose.
I will deliberately refrain from talking about any political issues, because it should be evident by now that this is undeniably an ecological — not a political! — problem. It therefore needs ecological solutions, not political ones. Talk about political “solutions” is a waste of time, an unnecessary detour with limited possibilities for success. ‘The environment’ does not care about more petitions, protests, agreements, talks, promises, reports, meetings, campaigns, discussions, laws and regulations, about humans talking to humans about humans, men in suits in offices in cities, nor does it about who’s being called president or prime minister. Politics is too bureaucratic, too theoretic, too alienated from the real world, takes too long, is too corrupt, and too unreliable. There is too much opposition and too much self-interest.
We are on our own on this one, and no politicians will magically save the world for us.
Because I live in the tropics, I am most familiar with this particular ecology, and consequently many examples will be drawn from tropical settings. While certain examples or techniques are clearly limited to the tropics, they might be applied in other climates as well in one form or another — thinking this through is up to the interested reader. The outline of the ideas presented here should be sufficient to adapt them to almost all climate zones that can be sustainably inhabited by modern humans.
Not all of my thoughts on this topic are easy to digest, some sound quaint at first, and some are highly controversial. But for lack of alternatives to the current way of living (and slightly altered versions of it), I will try to lay out a roadmap to a better world for us and every other organism. This obviously includes a good bit of unprecedented optimism — and I will be accused of utopianism, idealism, naivety, and probably a few other, less friendly things. But the world I have in mind is not a bad one, and maybe you happen to find some of my ideas soothing and nurturing as well. The problem is not humanity by and large, it is merely our current culture of death and destruction.
There is no reason to give up all hope yet.
For reasons of convenience, I have published the answer to each of the four questions separately, so you can read one at a time whenever you have a few minutes. For the full version, click here.
All parts of this essay are of course completely free to access and not hidden behind a paywall. If you are more comfortable reading offline or on an ebook reader, you can also download the .pdf, .epub, and .mobi file here.
Part IV: How can we do this?
“A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.”
— Albert Einstein
In this final chapter I include a small collection of a few key aspects that definitely need to change in order for human society to become regenerative and eventually sustainable, with a short explanation as to why they have to change and a drafted answer to the question how. Of course, this is no universally applicable handbook, since there is no such thing. People and their circumstances are way too different, and therefore there cannot be one concept that fits everybody. But there are certain outlines that will lead you into the right direction. You will have to explore and find out a lot for yourself, try what works for you and your environment, and figure out personal preferences. It is a challenging but rewarding adventure, and you surely will never be bored again.
But be advised: while the simple life in Nature is much better than city life in terms of exposure to pollutants, stress, and other health hazards, it is far from being only idyllic and worry-free — sometimes it demands a certain amount of sacrifice from us. We will have to bleed, sweat and cry at times to overcome obstacles. Our hands will blister, we will cut and bruise ourselves, but we will simultaneously remember how good it feels to be alive. Every time a small but annoying wound (like from a thorn in the foot) heals, we will rejoice with our regained abilities, and every time we will feel like a part of us has been reborn. Every time an injury closes we will regain a bit of trust in ourselves and our body’s healing abilities. We will feel more connected to ourselves, our surroundings, and become more confident with using our body. We will become physically stronger and harder, and we will gain wisdom and knowledge faster than we might imagine. Over time, we will learn a lot, we will master skills, and become more satisfied with ourselves. We will rediscover what it means to be a human and how good it feels to be part of this beautiful, awe-inspiring, gigantic ecosystem we call Planet Earth.
Living a self-sufficient, natural lifestyle is more rewarding than anybody working a regular job in the city can imagine, yet it is not free of occasional frustration. But life is not supposed to be too easy, and it would become boring fast if it was.
There is no greater joy than being able to feed yourself, to simply take a walk through the garden and gather enough food for the day. Feeding only yourself and your immediate community doesn’t usually require much of an effort anyway, no matter where you live (compared to the 8-hour working day). Building your own house, living in it from day to day with your loved ones, and repairing it when necessary will fill you with more pride and joy than any apartment, loft, row house, or mansion in the city ever could — even if it turns out to look “less professional” (which is just a pessimist way of saying “more unique”).
The self-sufficient lifestyle will gift you with more freedom, leisure time, and self-determination than you’d find anywhere in the world of employment.
Lend an ear to those who already went through the first steps, and they will reassure you that it is not only possible, but that it’s wort it.
The question of how exactly to transform this society cannot be answered with certainty. Now that we have a direction, we will have to try and rely on human nature, human instinct, human animality, and human cooperation, love, creativity and problem-solving abilities. We will fail, maybe even repeatedly and with large setbacks, but we will learn from those failures and keep pressing on.
Urban Exodus
As previously explained, we will have to give up cities. This might be the most difficult part, first because it means stepping out of your comfort zone into the unknown, and second because there is no precedent for this in recent history, so we’ll have to proceed by trial and error. It might sound frightening at first, but as a reassuring motivation we always have to keep in mind what the alternative (business as usual) and its consequences would be.
We will have to sell, give away or abandon most of our material possessions. In preparation, we should get our hands on books or other information on local wild plants, on edible and medicinal herbs, indigenous cultures, primitive skills, organic gardening handbooks, and permacultural techniques appropriate to our climate zone [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6]. Much of this material is available online for free (if you know where to look) or in libraries, and can be printed out and/or copied for a few bucks.
This step is not mandatory, though, since subsistence farming is not difficult and can be learned with little or no previous knowledge through observing and experimenting a bit. Permaculture is not rocket science.
For the few of us who already have a nice patch of land they’re rewilding, this means frantically saving seeds and distributing them to whoever asks friendly. It means sharing your knowledge and your experience, and informing others about how you got to where you are right now.
For those of us with enough capital at hand, this means acquiring as much land as possible, and distributing it equally to people who lack those financial resources, but are genuinely interested in going back to the land.
Those of us who don’t have enough money to buy land rely on either searching for a place to volunteer, take care of, help out, and become a part of — or simply occupying abandoned or fallow farmland. The latter is illegal by present standards, yes, but the more people do it, the safer it becomes, since the police cannot possibly arrest everybody for it if we do it in large enough numbers. If anything, politicians have to actively support this trend. They can no longer deny that we have to start healing the planet (after all, they signed the Paris Agreement which means that they at least acknowledge the problem and its severity), so supporting people who do just that becomes imperative. Before standing armies and the police force cease to exist (for lack of payment or lack of people), they have to be prevented from doing too much damage to people pledging allegiance to the land. They have to understand that their own future and the future of their children depends on this, too. For the sake of our species’ long-term survival, refusing to obey certain orders can help enormously.
As paradoxical as it sounds, land might as well get cheaper if just enough people start moving to the countryside, as more and more people go from consumer to self-sufficient producer. When large-scale farmers lack consumers to buy up their surplus, part of their land becomes obsolete. When there is too much supply, prices plummet and they are forced to sell parts of their lands. If you personally know a farmer or big land owner, go talk to him and try to negotiate a deal. If you or your friends have grandparents in the countryside, this might be your first choice.
I personally started out volunteering on somebody else’s land, and when I proved myself as diligent and dedicated, I was offered to build my house in the back of the garden, and become a long-term member of the community I still live in today. You will be offered similar choices, if you just try hard enough.
Soil
Globally, soils contain more carbon than living plant biomass and the atmosphere together. The enormous size of the global soil organic carbon stock, along with its long turn-over time, makes soils the most important part of the terrestrial carbon cycle at regional and global scales. While the soil carbon content has been steadily declining since the dawn of agriculture, this trend can be reversed. Conventional agriculture leads to topsoil erosion, soil acidification, and the loss of carbon and nitrogen — whereas in permaculture, soil is the most important aspect. If you have healthy, good soil, the plants will grow all by themselves without any trouble. To make up for the loss of topsoil and the concomitant nutritional deficit of the upper layers of soil, there are three easy methods: cover crops, humanure (see below), and biochar.
Cover crops are nitrogen-fixing, fast-growing short plants (like peanut grass) that cover the soil and therefore stabilize it with their roots and prevent runoff. Rain does not directly batter the soil, and sun does not dry it out so fast. In contrast to mulching (which has similar effects), cover crops regenerate themselves and don’t need to be renewed. Agriculture allows only one crop in the field, so the rest of the soil lays bare — the sun bakes the topsoil, all insect life flees deeper underground or dies, UV radiation destroys microorganisms and mycorrhizae in the upmost soil layer, and with every rain, valuable nutrition is washed away.
We can observe again what Nature herself does: bare soil is an injury, and as wounds on our body quickly get covered with scab, Nature covers up her ailments with fast-growing pioneer plants we call “weeds”. In a healthy ecosystem you rarely ever see the earth. It is covered either in thick underbrush, grasses, herbs, or fallen leaves.
Biochar is a topic so comprehensive that whole books were written about it, most notably “The Biochar Solution”. Summarized can be said that biochar is simply charcoal (basically pure carbon) used as a soil additive to increase fertility and store carbon for hundreds, if not thousands of years. This is the easiest way to “sequester” carbon permanently, and everybody can easily do it, without much expertise and knowledge, all around the world, with fast-growing soft woods, bamboo, or any other source of biomass that you find in abundance in your ecosystem.
A special kind of soil worth mentioning when talking about biochar is terra preta (del indio), which contains five times as much carbon as regular rainforest soil (usually notoriously nutrient-poor — over 90 percent of the biomass is stored in plants) and is the only kind of soil that regenerates itself. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not created accidentally through the mindless discarding of charcoal from hearths and fireplaces — those people knew exactly what they were doing. Indigenous farming communities, well aware of the benefits of adding biochar to the soil in an effort to make rainforest soil arable, cleared small patches of land through controlled burning (also known as slash-and-char, swidden agriculture or shifting cultivation) and hence systematically created the best soil ever encountered — and they did all that two thousand years ago, with the most primitive tools, and without advanced technology and scientific analysis.
Forests
Forests are going to be the most important thing in our lives. We will have to plant, nurture, water, weed, and care for young saplings as good as we can, and soon enough they will outgrow us, spend us shadow and gift us with fruit and craft materials. The forest will be our home, our supermarket, our movie theater, our community center, our night club, our school, our workplace, our vacation home, and our cemetery.
The more you get to know the forest, and the more you learn about how forests and all its constituent organisms work, the more you will enjoy being a part of it. For beginners, there are many books [1; 2; 3; 4; 5] with excellent explanations backed by latest scientific findings that will help you see trees and other plants for what they really are: living beings, just like us.
Planting trees is one of the most rewarding things I can imagine. Watching them grow fills you with joy and awe as Nature’s pure power unfolds is full potential. Each tree is an individual, and even two trees of the same species are going to be quite different from each other as they slowly mature. They filter air and water, and create a pleasant microclimate beneath their canopy.
Just how vital intact forests are to the ecosystem (e.g. for ensuring rainfall further inland) is currently being explored — and the results so far are staggering. In the past it was understood that the Amazon rainforest came into being because it rains a lot there. Now we know that it rains a lot in the Amazon because there are many trees. The tree cover acts like a conveyor belt for humidity, constantly recycling it up into the atmosphere, so that water is carried further inland and promotes tree growth there.
Some of the most important things to learn come from a field called “indigenous land management”. In his book “Tending the Wild: Stories of People and Plants and Tropical Forests”, ecologist Charles M. Peters describe “forest gardens” that look like pristine wilderness to outsiders. While western forestry manages at most four or five species per hectare, in rainforests tended by indigenous people you can easily encounter species densities of 150 different species per hectare — all cared for and regularly used by its inhabitants. Everything from a wide range of forest foods, over wood for construction, bark and vines used as rope, firewood, resins, and medicinal plants, to the palm thatch to roof houses comes from the forest. His conclusion is this:
“There is, truth be known, no ‘wild’ in the tropics, because local communities have been doing forest management for thousands of years. If Westerners want to learn about the conservation and sustainable use of tropical forests, these are the people we need to talk to first.”
Excrement/Humanure
If we want to take a serious attempt at something even remotely sustainable, we have to reconsider the way we shit. Feces are somewhat of a taboo in our culture, but there is nothing in the way of changing our attitude. Most people who are reluctant to talk and think about their own waste products are the hyper-civilized humans that deny being part of the animal kingdom the most vehemently. This extreme form of self-denial (there is ample evidence that we are functioning just like any other mammal, and very scarce evidence that we are special and separated from the rest of the fauna) causes a broad variety of issues, from unnecessary shame, over psychological problems, to abnormal and unnatural behavior. The most underrated school of philosophy, Cynicism, teaches that you shouldn’t be ashamed of anything that is natural. Everybody ingests and excretes, so there is absolutely no reason to feel bad for that.
Most people drop their daily loads of organic waste into a water closet — which is arguably the worst possible place for our shit to land. It creates a breeding ground for harmful bacteria, turns into a toxic, smelly stew, and is treated at industrial facilities with highly dangerous chemicals. No other terrestrial mammal intentionally shits only into clean water, and the consequences of them doing so would be disastrous.
Human excrement is actually extremely valuable fertilizer, if made from the right foodstuffs and if treated right. Derrick Jensen went as far as to call our shit “a gift from us to our habitat, [..] a gift of fertile soil, given in response to the nourishment our habitat gives us”, and the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. We humans can eat a large variety of species, and the bigger this variety, the better the fertilizer we unintentionally produce. If we eat a good variety of valuable, nutritious semi-wild foods, without chemicals and pollutants, and without mixing it with pharmaceuticals (which might kill soil microbes), it makes a relatively safe load of pure plant nutrients.
Every other animal randomly drops packages of fertilizer wherever they go, and through the digestive process in our bodies, molecules are broken down and the excreted nutrients are, after a short composting process, readily available for plants to take them up. Ecosystems work in cycles, and if we humans chemically contaminate our excrement, we break the cycle. When we extract nutrients from the land, we have to put nutrients back. This is how China kept its soil fertile for millennia.
It is mandatory to recycle our shit as fertilizer. Plants love it, and there is an easy way to create terra preta: once you’ve built a compost toilet of your choice (there are no limitations to your creativity in designing one), you can use powdered charcoal to cover your little heap of future fertilizer with. This eliminates any smell, and the charcoal will readily absorb nutrients, and become “charged” biochar in the process. Once the hole is full (or you change the bucket, depending on your design), let the humanure-charcoal mix decompose somewhere quiet for three to six months — after that it’s ready to use! The plants in your garden will show you how much they like your little present almost immediately.
Nonetheless, you need to be careful not to contract harmful germs in the process of handling your shit during the first few months. Be sure to sterilize any shovels and other tools you used with fire and always wash your hands after working with humanure.
Population levels
Talking about population is always difficult, because if you point out that there are too many people in this world others automatically assume that you’re a serial killer. Some people have been worried about population growth for centuries, and they have been ridiculed mercilessly when their predictions didn’t come true. Yet any population, bacteria or human, is subject to the same biological laws, so poking fun at Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” is like making fun of the San Andreas Fault for not going off, or of the Yellowstone supervolcano for not erupting, or of the Sun for not bursting into a supernova. We know it will happen eventually, we’re just not sure about the exact date yet.
Our population will plummet one way or the other. It is up to us if we choose the bloody way or the self-determined way. In theory, if every couple worldwide would have one kid, the population would halve within a single generation. This can’t be enforced (as can be seen with China’s “One Child Policy”), and it is highly unlikely that it ever will happen, but if we manage to scare enough people with the consequences of unrestrained population growth, it might just be enough to make a difference.
Hunter-gatherers, just like other wild animals, are subject to and make use of certain natural methods to keep their population on a sustainable level — failing to do so would result in increased food insecurity and possibly even warfare. One such natural factor is food availability, another one is lifestyle habits. In an agricultural society you will have large surpluses of starchy food (carbohydrates), and a lifestyle that allows for many children. As explained before, in a sedentary agricultural community there is no need to carry small children around from one camp to the next (so you can basically have as many as you want), and they can be weaned after only one year (as opposed to 3–4 years among hunter-gatherers) to shorten the period between having children. Carbohydrates are ‘stable calories’, long chains of single sugars, that our body slowly cuts up converts into energy one by one during the day. They signal the human female’s body that now would be a good and safe time for pregnancy, since every day vast amounts of long-range saturating calories make up the agricultural diet.
If we wouldn’t make carbohydrates our one and only staple food (but eat a more diverse and therefore healthy diet with, fore example, more dietary fiber instead), the effect on our hitherto unrestrained population growth would be almost immediate, without anybody having to ingest artificial hormones, starve to death or commit infanticide.
Civilized folks are generally overfed (but undernourished), so simply not eating too much every single meal would already slightly decrease fertility in women — a desirable goal in an utterly overcrowded world. But many people in our society would like to experience the joys of parenthood, and in a (for whatever reason) monogamous society of single households, having your own “personal” kids is the only option (if you don’t want to go through mountains of paperwork for adoption). In a tribal setting, this problem is solved with shared parenthood. This way, everybody is sure to enjoy the company of children and contribute to their education, but nobody becomes too exhausted of being a parent, since there are always others to assist you that can take care of the brat for a few hours if you need to do something important. In many polygamous tribes nobody can be quite sure who the father is anyway, so every man treats the kid like a father would. This is great for the children, too, because they have a lot of people who genuinely care about them. If they have an argument with their father, they can still go to a number of other “fathers” for emotional support. Having kids around can be a true blessing, and with shared parenthood anyone can take part.
Furthermore, indigenous populations worldwide have used hundreds of plants to inhibit pregnancy, since it is a much more comfortable solution not to get pregnant in the first place than to have to deal with an unwanted child .
Neem tree and other natural antifertility agents might not have a 100% success rate, but neither do condoms.
All in all, natural contraceptives, shared parenthood, extended and shared breastfeeding, awareness of the consequences of overpopulation, a low-carb diet, and a natural aboriginal lifestyle will, when combined and applied wisely, almost automatically keep population levels at bay.
Redefining Basic Concepts, Ethics, Morals, and Freedom
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
— Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
To create a regenerative society, we will need to redefine and revaluate our measurements of well-being, status, and morality. With our new knowledge, we have to take a hard look at basic concepts thought to be universal, such as luxury, comfort, wealth, success, progress, development, rich, happy, or freedom. What I try to accomplish in the following is not to come up with the ultimate definition of those concepts, but to start a conversation and get you thinking.
‘Comfort’, for example, is a concept largely invented by a deceptive advertising industry for the purpose of selling us more products and make us weak and apathetic in the process. There is no empirical reason to believe sleeping on a $1,000 mattress makes our sleep any better or restorative (other than our blind trust in money).
‘Luxury’ easily turns into an arms race of amassing rare goods for status, and should therefore not be defined by material goods at all. The definition of luxury is better to be limited to non-material concepts, like having the luxury to take a tea break or a swim whenever you want, or the luxury not to work for a whole week if you don’t feel like it.
It all depends on how we define those words, as the following example shows:
“[As for the claim] that the ‘overall material standard of living seems to be increasing,’ the way that works is that the technoindustrial system simply defines the term ‘high standard of living’ to mean the kind of living that the system itself provides, and the system then ‘discovers’ that the standard of living is high and increasing. But to me and to many, many other people a high material standard of living consists not in cars, television sets, computers, or fancy houses, but in open spaces, forests, wild plants and animals, and clear-flowing streams. As measured by that criterion our material standard of living is falling rapidly.”
– Theodore J. Kaczynski, excerpt from letter to Dr. David Skrbina, printed in Technological Slavery (2008)
I guess it is not too far-fetched to say that what our society calls ‘comfort’, ‘ease’, or ‘high standard’ does not automatically equal happiness. We have created a hedonistic global society, united in their pursuit of pleasure in the most obscure fields one can imagine, yet no recreational activity, no job, no sense of ‘duty’ and ‘purpose’ our society tries to cram into our heads seems to be able to truly make us happy on the long run. The reason might be that all of the aforementioned boils down to a wallpaper change of your prison cell — merely superficial and without any depth.
More artificial pleasure in the form of negligible pay raises, virtual achievements, new series and movies, likes, followers, more toys and gadgets, or access to free porn does not make us happier, at least not in the long term. Quite the contrary, one could make the argument that it is a strenuous life that often leads to the individual being happier, because of the profound sense of purpose, and the wisdom one obtains after facing difficult challenges and dealing with them, whether with success or not. You probably know people who have had a very easy life, and you probably also know that those are not the happiest people. If everything comes to you without you even lifting a finger, it is difficult to perceive yourself as having a purpose. Yet if you feel like you have a purpose, you can endure hardship without much trouble. Friedrich Nietzsche said: “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
The most difficult concept is freedom. Humans generally don’t like being told what to do, so freedom can mean the freedom to do whatever you want — the opposite of oppression. Yet this also can mean having the freedom to destroy Nature and take other lives as we please. A good start is the rule of thumb “my freedom ends where your freedom begins”, only that this rule is traditionally applied only to humans. If we were to extend it to include nonhuman animals and even plants, we’d be closer to a confining definition of freedom that can’t do too much harm to the ecosystem, and is therefore closer to sustainability. It doesn’t mean that you can’t cut down trees or arrow deer, it just means that you do those things only when you really have to — not for fun and not when your basic needs are already satisfied.
Freedom is often based on choices. Our society defines freedom by how many superficial life choices we can consider. Shall I become a marine biologist, a doctor, a singer or a pilot; should I buy this or that (or one of the hundred other brands of) breakfast cereal; do I have Korean, Italian, Mexican, Tunesian or Chinese food for dinner; which motored vehicle represents best who I am. Yet every choice that goes deeper than that is off limits. Currently we are not allowed to choose to become nomadic and cross nation-state borders as we please, we can’t choose to become a hunter-gatherer and live in the national parks, or choose not to pay taxes. We might choose not to work for the system, but that makes a lot of things much more difficult.
Anyway, the point here is this: having choices seem to be fundamental to any definition of freedom.
But, as Robert Wolff points out in his book Original Wisdom, not having choices may actually be a lot easier.
In the past, people chose to eat whatever they had available on any given day, married one of the girls next door or from the next village, and worked whatever needed to be done.
While this limited number of options initially seems inferior to today’s abundance of choices, the people who live like this are by no means any less happy — quite the contrary. People in modern society often feel overwhelmed by the responsibility that comes with too many choices, they constantly ask themselves if they really have the right job or if they would be happier elsewhere, if their partner is really their soulmate or if there is someone who would love them more out there, and just choosing where to go for dinner can give them a headache. This creates restlessness, and people never stop chasing “happiness”, which is, as they believe, just around the next corner. So they waver from job to job, from relationship to relationship, without ever taking a break and settling in.
Truth is, there can be freedom in limitation, as long as this limitation is self-imposed and doesn’t compromise or well-being too much. Maybe true freedom is not having to choose in the first place, but just going with the flow without being forced to do things you don’t want to do.
The introductory quote to Part II got me thinking a lot. Judging a culture by its woods would immediately show which cultures are degenerative and which are not, and climate breakdown would not be an issue if people worked first and foremost on their forests and not on their material wealth. Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic (quoted above) would, if applied on the global scale, almost immediately solve many pressing environmental problems. The key is to put the biotic community (the ecosystem) first and subordinate human needs. This does not compromise human well-being at all, since a human is just as healthy and happy as his environment, his natural habitat.
What if this was the new standard, judging a culture by the beauty and abundance of its forests? Levelling success by the number of bird species your part of the forest inhibits? How many different species make up your diet?
How profoundly different would this world look like if we just redefined a few key phases and expressions?
Culture
Culture and Nature are concepts unique to our Civilization. French anthropologist Philippe Descola writes in his milestone work “Beyond Nature and Culture” that anthropological inquiries among hunter-gatherers have found that no such concepts exist, and that the two are actually intertwined with no detectable distinction. Asking jungle tribes about Nature is like asking a fish about water — it is so omnipresent that there is no need to define and term it. Culture, too, is so obvious that there is little need to single it out and contemplate it. It is just what those people do, their traditions, and their everyday life.
This should be our goal, too: first to make Nature the basis for our culture again, animals and plants the objects of our reverence and worship and the inspirations for our songs and dances, and natural processes the basis of our metaphors and stories; and second to become a part of Nature again, so that the concept itself becomes obsolete.
The two biggest obstacles that we have to overcome is our culture’s view of Nature as a machine, and of us humans as being a separate entity, disconnected from Nature.
The mechanistical view of Nature, a byproduct of the Industrial Revolution, is now so commonplace that people mistake it to be a universal truth, and have a hard time imagining how people thought like before. We are so used to explaining body functions with computer terminology that we can’t even think of another way of making them understandable (Sadly, this also implies that it is easier for modern people to understand computers than it is to understand their own bodies).
But of course people weren’t wrong for hundreds of thousand years, utterly failing to understand other animals and plants because they lacked the machine analogy. It is this modern metaphor that is fundamentally flawed!
A machine is a conglomerate of individual parts that can be disintegrated, replaced, modified, and put back together without corrupting the functionality of the machine itself. Living beings don’t behave like that. Take the brain out of a grasshopper and put it back, let’s see if the “machine” will still run.
If you think of Nature as a machine, this automatically leads to a number of problems, like thinking that “natural machines” have neither soul nor feelings, or the seemingly irresistible modern urge to “improve” upon life, if necessary even through genetic engineering. A machine that doesn’t do what you want it to do in the most efficient manner, has to be improved upon. If crops “don’t grow fast enough”, people these days are inclined to apply the same logic.
Yet once you see this world for what it is (and what it was long before we invented machines), you will see that the Earth itself is a giant living, breathing, bleeding, sweating organism buzzing with life: the rivers are its veins, the forests its lungs, and the tides its heartbeat.
Nature, and each of her single constituents, is an organism, not a machine. If a machine has a damaged cog, you can easily replace it. If an organism has a faulty organ, it dies.
On a similar note, it is absolutely ridiculous that we believe that there is any inherent difference between Nature and human beings. Nobody would use this language when talking about other animals, since it obviously makes little sense to claim that earthworms or ducks, for example, are “really close to Nature”. The reason we perceive Nature as a sphere outside of ourselves is because we have lost the connection when we destroyed and enslaved our environment and started replacing it with things we built ourselves. But Nature never left — leave any city alone for a few millennia, and you will find a jungle when you return. Nature is still here, among us. Under the concrete, on our rooftops, and outside of our windows. And where do you even draw the line? Aren’t concrete, roofs and windows also somehow part of Nature, since they were made of materials that make up what we call Nature?
The solution to this confusing oxymoron is simple: accepting that we, too, are animals, we eat, drink, breathe, piss, shit, sweat, cry, scream, laugh, sing, move, communicate, and eventually die, just like all the others. Living a life that is less dissimilar from that of other animals, and subject to the same biological and evolutionary laws, rules, regulations and hazards.
We can continue to use the word “Nature”, but it makes more sense if we use it interchangeable with the words “planet”, “world”, “Earth”, “environment” and “home” — of which we are undoubtedly a part.
We believe that culture is something precious, something worth to preserve, and something that makes us different from other people. Yet all our modern cultures are the brainchild of exploiting, murdering, looting, slave-holding, and raping anthropocentric ancestors who knew close to nothing about their environment and acted in no other interest but their own.
Globalization has boiled down the colorful mix of cultures once found all over the planet into a greyish-brown stew, in which differences are merely superficial and dissolve more and more with every day. All civilized cultures focus on making money. All civilized cultures believe that the world belongs to us humans.
The only noteworthy difference is the one between civilized and primitive cultures, the one that Daniel Quinn called “Takers” and “Leavers”. But once you become a Leaver yourself, living locally and sustainably within your ecosystem, there should be little need to talk or think too much about cultures anyway. It’s a civilized concept that does nothing but divide and agitate us, and renders itself meaningless the moment civilization ceases to exist.
Myths
“The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.”
— Claude Lévi-Strauss
Every culture needs myths to explain the world to its members. We modern humans are very sure that our stories are not myths, yet they are nothing more, since the past is gone for good and no longer present in the present. We might have the most evidence to support our version of myths, and our myths might well be the most comprehensible. But they have become comprehensive to the extend that only a few experts really understand them, each limited to his or her field of study. Average people have to live with simplified versions that usually glorify our role as a species enormously.
Sure, reading about how photosynthesis works or how cells in our body work together in unity to convert glucose and oxygen molecules into carbon dioxide, water, and energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate can be absolutely astonishing, but not for everybody. Most people, as a matter of fact, think that this is quite boring.
But the same fascination that an interested person feels when he or she studies how life works is felt to the exact same degree (and maybe even a bit more, because of a hint of unexplainable magic) by primitive people when they listen to their elders telling stories about the origins or workings of things. There is no qualitative difference in the astonishment that a Yanomami feels when hearing how their god Omama created the forest, the rivers and the animals, and the astonishment of a modern student of the natural sciences who just understood how humans evolved from single-celled organisms. For our day-to-day lives, the details of our myths don’t matter much — as long as they create a stable frame of explanations within which we can live sustainable lives on the long term.
The myths of native populations sometimes have surprisingly much in common with modern scientific findings: you will her about a time when the climate was much different (as it was at several times during the Pleistocene) and about other events that far precede written history (like migrations), about humans, other animals, and even plants sharing common ancestors and being relatives (which we actually are, with a common ancestor — the eukaryotes — just about 2 billion years ago), and a lot of cautionary tales about what happens if you destroy your environment or don’t follow its rules.
The myths of our culture for the past 10,000 years have been predominantly and increasingly anthropocentric, to the point that we have created a religion that worships the human, and only the human: humanism. The belief that we are the most important species and everything around us exists solely for us to take and exploit has been with us since we made the first futile attempts to subjugate and dominate Nature during the Agricultural Revolution. First we believed it was the gods (or one god) who gave us a special place and status in this world, later we started believing that we don’t need the gods anymore, since now it is us who have acquired god-like powers. This way of thinking helped us to justify the increasingly brutal crimes we committed against our fellow animal siblings and plant cousins.
On our new path, we will need new myths to tell our children, myths in which every creature has a place, and that tell the story of everybody, not just us humans. It will be the task of the most creative storytellers to take what we now know of the world, strip it of its anthropocentric arrogance, and weave it into remarkable stories that reinforce a regenerative way of living and an animistic view of Nature. It is possible to retell the scientific history of the world in a way that sounds more like a myth, and less specific, alienated and complicated. It sure is spectacular and awesome enough.
Spiritual transformation
One can say with certainty that we humans are an inherently spiritual species, since no aboriginal culture was never discovered that was not profoundly spiritual in sophisticated ways. The umbrella term for this vastly differing pristine spirituality is ‘animism’ (from the Latin ‘anima’: life, soul), and can be roughly defined by the belief that everything, whether animal, plant, mushroom, rock, mountain, river, lake, or cloud is a person — with thoughts, wishes, dreams, needs, intentions, hopes, fears, and other emotions just like yourself. Everything is animated by a spiritual life force that runs through all beings and things alike. It is the belief in superficial differences and subliminal oneness. Everything has its place in the animist cosmos, everybody a role to play. Different forms of animism easily arise if we just have enough time to marvel at everything that happens around us. We slowly get to know the world around us, contemplate its beauty and abundance, and at times we shudder and feel miniscule and unimportant in the face of the gigantic global ecosystem, the natural world. This feeling is the first step: acknowledging that there is something much bigger, much more powerful, and much more important than us.
The absence of any profound spirituality in today’s youth is one of the most unexplored and unappreciated reasons for the extraordinarily high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, burnout and suicide.
People don’t know, and in fact would vehemently deny, that it is spirituality that they’re looking for. Spirituality is stupid, they say, and nobody but kids and uneducated savages believe in ghosts or spirits anyway. Yet every human has a craving to find a deeper meaning in the world around her. Without it we’re empty husks, dragging ourselves to work and back, hoping that it all ends soon.
Only finding the sacred can fill the void that we try to cram with an endless amount of disposable consumer items.
Where once was a deep belief in our fellow creatures and the forces that keep the world spinning, is now the persistent feeling of loneliness, in a world crammed with strangers. We try to stuff this hole in ourselves with unrestrained consumption, with binge-shopping, binge-drinking, binge-eating and binge-watching, and advertising promises us that we’re only one purchase away from happiness and fulfillment.
We wish there was more to life, we feel alienated and alone, not realizing that our environment — even in the cities — is humming with life, life that buzzes through the air, scurries around our feet, shoots from the ground, and gushes out of the cracks in the pavement. If we follow this trail of life, we’ll find what we were missing all those years. Provided that Nature around you thrives and you have open eyes and an open mind, spirituality will come all by itself. It is difficult not to see the sacred in every living creature and in every wild place once you learn how to observe, imitate, appreciate, and learn from them.
Of course, I don’t see any of this happening, not right now and not in the near future, or at least not on a scale that would really make a difference. And I highly doubt that it will.
But the ideas are there, the solutions within reach. I hope that as climate breakdown continues to wreak havoc and destroy livelihoods, as much beloved species disappear forever from the surface of the planet, more and more people will wake up and realize that the key to sustainability is the reversing of the damage we’ve inflicted upon Nature.
I know very well that seeing what happens to this world can at times overwhelm you. I know the feelings of desperateness and doom that arise with the ecocide unfolding around us. The sadness that overcomes us when we visualize the unbelievable scale of suffering we caused and continue to cause as a culture. The insecurity and fear when thinking about the future of yourself and your loved ones.
Surely, things will change a lot in our lifetimes.
But whereas the eventual extinction of homo sapiens seems more likely today than probably ever since we moved out of Africa, we should never underestimate the healing power of our Great Mother Earth.
On the long term, we can — at the very least — be sure that life on Earth will prevail. We might be powerful, but not powerful enough to block out the sun, let the water vanish, or wipe out every pigeon, every rat, every cockroach, every tardigrade, let alone every bacterium on the surface of the planet.
The pack of cards will be reshuffled, though, regardless of our wants and needs.
We must be concerned with the future, because if we’re not, the chances of us surviving on both the individual and the species level drop drastically. But we must not fear it, for if we think and act wisely, not all is lost. We must always remember that human civilization is not synonymous with humankind.
While our own extinction is definitely a possibility, so far the most alarming studies predicted merely the end of globalized human civilization — not the end of humans themselves — which might be not all that bad after all.
It will be the end of cars, airplanes, container ships, combine harvesters, excavators, warships, stealth bombers, bulldozers, tractors, and trucks, of highways, cities, suburbs, supermarkets, factories, shopping malls, airports, open-pit mines, computers, TV’s, solar panels, conveyor belts, robots, drones, smartphones, refrigerators, ATM’s, and of oil, minerals, concrete, plastic, noise, steel, toxic chemicals, cold light, microplastics, and fine dust pollution. From this point of view, it might actually be good if the destructive system, the machine that spun out of control in a matter of centuries, finally croaks and stops. Yes, large cities will be rendered uninhabitable, devoured by tidal waves, battered by storms and hurricanes, but that doesn’t mean its inhabitants await the same fate. It is their choice to abandon the sinking ship — or to sink with it. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. We can continue draining every last bit of financial profit from the world to make merchandise, or we can start building a world that our children and grandchildren will thank us for.
Derrick Jensen rightly stated that the only measure by which future generations will judge us is the health of the landbase they inherit. They will not care how much money we made, what job we had, which countries we visited, and what car we drove. They will not be interested in how many rooms our house had, how many channels our TV’s received and how many apps we used on our smartphones. They will not be impressed by the speed of our broadband connections, the megawatts created by our power plants, and the values of our stocks and portfolios.
The only thing they will truly care about will be the state of the world that they will inhabit. Will it be a world devoid of any life, coated in toxic dust and soaked in chemical sludge, with its soil turned upside down, its forests razed, its oceans turned into acidic dead zones, with temperatures soaring, constant famine, and shortage of clean drinking water?
Or will it be a land of plenty, where the forests are so vast and dense that its inhabitants deem it possible that they span the entire world, with clear, cold rivers full of fish, mussels, crabs, shrimp, and water striders, and with seemingly endless flocks of majestic birds in the sky, where fruit trees and delicious leaves are found wherever one goes, where wildlife is abundant in all layers of the canopy, and where the birds, cicadas and crickets sing without rest?
Will the world be green… or black?
It is easy to revert to nihilist thought and sarcasm, lean back, and watch the world burn — and it is more difficult to actually get up and do something. But make sure you’ll never lose yourself in the magnitude of distractions that society offers. Read every article, read every book, and if it makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s a good thing. We must first see and understand the context in which our lives are happening before we can start changing it. And the more you understand the context, the more urgent it becomes that we should not be leaning back and distracting ourselves amidst the unfolding global ecocide.
We can choose to inform and educate ourselves, we can choose if we want to perpetuate the problem or work to eliminate it. We can choose if we want to continue doing what we did for the last ten millennia — or if we try something new. Right now would be a good time we learn from the mistakes of our recent past, our detour into the world of the land-devouring, degenerative, unnatural social organization we call civilization, and contemplate what we can learn from our own species’ deep history and from all the other species around us.
On a biological timescale, we are still a young species, and maybe we have yet to learn from our reckless teenage mistakes as we slowly come of age, get to know our place in this world, and settle in.
Simon Lewis, professor of Global Change Science at the University College London and co-author of the book “The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene”, thinks it very likely that the high atmospheric carbon levels will be balanced out eventually:
“Nonetheless, whether society stops emitting large quantities of carbon dioxide or we finally run out of fossil fuels, the climate impacts will not last a geologically important length of time in the context of Earth’s history. Natural processes will slowly remove the high levels of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, probably in about 100,000 years.”
With or without humans, that is.
Not all is lost if we just start acting now. Time is running out, but we still have about a decade to get our shit together.
I am a far cry from being a Christian, but nonetheless fairly familiar with Christian mythology. When I think about us domesticated humans, the situation we’ve put ourselves into, and the way we ought to go, I am unwittingly reminded of the Parable of the Prodigal Son that Jesus tells to his disciples.
We are that Prodigal Son, who, after spending every last dime of his parents’ fortune in a ‘distant land’ (the city?), finally realizes his mistake and comes back home in deep shame, where his parents wait with open arms and tears in their eyes. Our home, and our figurative parents, are Nature. After all, Nature nurtures us every day and without her we would not live even another minute. The fortune that was presented to us were our fellow animals that we mistreated so carelessly, the myriad plants and fungi that we overlooked and ignored for so long, the clear rivers and the majestic oceans, the dense rainforests, the vast savannah, the open tundra, the endless plains, — and we’ve spent it all.
Now we expect to be rejected, condemned to a life of servitude and redemption for our sins, in the mud among the ‘lowest creatures’ — but Nature will receive us with open arms, and throw a big celebration in our name. Food and drink are going to be abundant, and there will be song and dance.
The older son from the story, who refuses to join the celebration of reunion, represents the few remaining primitive tribes, who have lost almost everything to our insatiable greed. They have stayed at home, all those millennia, while we turned forests into deserts and cornucopias into toxic wastelands. Over time, they will forgive us, if we show real remorse.
We were lost, but now we’re found.
Sources & Further Reading
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States; James C. Scott; Yale University Press (August 2017)
Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin — Properties — Management; Johannes Lehmann (et al.); Springer (January 2004)
Managing the Wild: Stories of People and Plants and Tropical Forests; Charles M. Peters; Yale University Press (February 2018)
Nomads of the Dawn: The Penan of the Borneo Rain Forest; Wade Davis (et al.); Pomegranate (April 1995)
Peak Everything; Richard Heinberg; New Society Publishers (2011)
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia; James C. Scott; Yale University Press (2009)
The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change; Albert Bates; New Society Publishers (2010)
The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman; Davi Kopenawa (et al.); Harvard University Press (2013)
The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate; Peter Wohlleben; Greystone Books (May 2015)
The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene; Simon L. Lewis & Mark Maslin; Yale University Press (June 2018)
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming; Masanobu Fukuoka; NYRB Classics (June 2009)
The Story of B; Daniel Quinn; Bantam Publishing (December 1996)
What a Plant Knows; Daniel Chamovitz; Scientific American (2012)
Studies
Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided; Proceedings of the Royal Society (2012)
Classifying drivers of global forest loss; Science (September 2018)
Climate Resilience and Food Security; iisd (2013)
Defaunation affects carbon storage in tropical forests (2015)
Ending Tropical Deforestation — A Stock-Take of Progress and Challenges; Tropical Forests and Climate Change; World Resources Institute (2018)
Extreme Carbon Inequality; Oxfam (December 2015)
Global Warming of 1.5 °C; IPCC Special Report (October 2018)
Global Sustainable Development Report 2019; Transformation: The Economy [Draft]; (August 2018)
Income Inequality and Carbon Emissions in the United States — A State-level Analysis 1997–2012; Ecological Economics (2017)
Mapping tree density at a global scale; Nature; (2015)
Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence; American Journal of Play (2009)
Prehistorically modified soils of central Amazonia — a model for sustainable agriculture in the twenty-first century; Royal Society (2006)
Rate of tree carbon accumulation increases continuously with tree size; Nature (2014)
Slash and Char: An Alternative to Slash and Burn in the Amazon Basin (2004)
The biomass distribution on Earth; PNAS (2017)
The limits of technological solutions to sustainable development; Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy (2003)
The roles and values of wild foods in agricultural systems; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2010)
The Value of Tropical Forest to Local Communities -Complications, Caveats, and Cautions; Conservation Ecology (2002)
Will we ever stop using fossil fuels; MIT CEEPR (2016)
About the author:
Dave is working hard to make a difference and tries something completely new in order to make the world livable once again. His natural habitat helps him not to lapse into agony while watching what happens to this world.
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