The future will be green… or black. (2 of 4)
A down-to-earth vision of how to avoid the worst
***THIS IS PART II OF IV***
Click to go to Part I, Part III, or Part IV
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 II: What does “living sustainably” even mean (and is it really the goal)?
“A culture is no better than its woods.”
— W.H. Auden
“Sustainability” is the battle cry of a new wave of ‘green’ capitalists who seek to take advantage of the ecological crisis by selling people more goods and services that are supposedly good for the environment, and of feel-good consumers who literally buy their lies. It is generally seen as something positive, yet only few people seem to grasp what this term really means. A definition everyone can agree upon is “being able to be maintained at a certain rate or level”. Sustainable lays between de- and regenerative, with “degenerative” describing the current prevailing lifestyle, and “regenerative” being systems like forests or coral reefs, which, if left alone, accumulate biomass, store carbon (!), grow in size, and produce an ever-greater abundance of diversity. (Diversity is important in evolution, because it translates to resilience. The greater the diversity of species, the safer it is that at least some will survive changing external conditions.)
The world can hardly ‘sustain’ 7.5 billion people, especially so if they all strive for the lifestyle of the developed world. Furthermore, it is not enough to merely sustain our current level of material wealth and consumption if we want to avoid the worst. “Living sustainable” at best means that if everyone would live like that, environmental conditions would not worsen.
In a dying world this is not enough.
Ask yourself: do you personally know anybody who lives truly sustainable? Probably not. Maybe you know of a few small-scale farmers or homesteaders, but I highly doubt that they really lead a sustainable life. Do they use electricity from a solar cell? A computer (like me)? A smartphone? A car? Power tools? There you have it.
If you want true sustainability, you can’t have any of the aforementioned, since they all require the technoindustrial system of extracting, refining, processing, transporting, assembling, distributing and, finally, discarding. Each of those steps is an act of war against Nature.
At the very least, certain parts of those machines will need to be replaced, and those parts are all supplied by the technoindustrial system. For example, no community can mine, extract, melt, purify, and shape the copper needed for electrical wires all by themselves.
The facilities, techniques, infrastructure and knowledge required to do this surpass everything that can be achieved by cooperating with — not dominating — Nature.
Anything that you can’t produce from locally gathered materials, either alone or with the help of a few friends, can hardly ever be sustainable, because every rate of decline in ecosystem stability leads to its collapse eventually. This means neither electric lights, nor solar cells, computers, mobile phones, dishwashers, toasters, automobiles, aircraft, or cities can ever be sustainable.
(I am not saying it is entirely impossible, but I have yet to meet the person that can build a smartphone or a skyscraper in a sustainable fashion.)
When we talk about sustainability, this also automatically implies that we think over the long term. Nobody can be sure after five or ten years that his lifestyle is “sustainable”, since those short time intervals don’t mean anything to the Earth herself. If we were to travel 100,000 years into the future and that lifestyle would be still predominant, we might start using the word “sustainable”. Again, humans have been foragers for over three million years, so speaking of a natural foraging lifestyle as ‘sustainable’ is a correct way to use the term. Using ‘sustainable’ to describe your “green” start-up or business strategy after a mere two years is not.
The main reason why all international climate summits and mainstream environmentalist “solutions” fail is because they ask “how do we keep the ecosystem from collapsing — while still keeping our current standard of living?” Their interpretation of “sustainability” means the sustaining of our present wealth, lifestyle and comforts. They still focus on jobs, the economy, profits, and technology. The real ‘Inconvenient Truth’ is that we will have to give up all of the aforementioned if we ever want to achieve anything that might be called sustainable. Cities are not sustainable, globalization is not sustainable, industrialism is not sustainable, and neither are consumerism, capitalism, democracy, nation-states, governments, and companies. People slowly wake up to this — and they are terrified. Most people in the developed world can’t and don’t want to imagine a world without capitalism — yet this is where we’re heading either way, if the system continues to work or ceases to do so.
What are the alternatives? A new Dark Age? Widespread famine and epidemics? War and genocide?
The reality will most likely be much less gruesome than Hollywood wants us to believe (remember who controls the media and its tales of no alternatives to the way things are?), even though there are a number of burdens to overcome. A rapid collapse of the current order might not turn out pretty in densely populated areas such as cities, but maybe this would be some form of strange, erratic justice being done in the name of Nature, judged by the size of the carbon footprint. But if we would gradually convert to a different lifestyle intentionally, dangers are limited.
Inhabitants of cities are definitely the most vulnerable when it comes to disruptions in the system. No more oil? No electricity? No running water? Disturbances in the distributions of goods? Even if only temporary (meaning a few weeks or even months), in any of those scenarios the city would plunge into chaos. Since many rich people live in densely populated areas, it is their first and foremost priority to ensure that everything runs smoothly within this artificial habitat.
Why do you think the environment is being destroyed right now? The answer is: to satisfy the material demands of the rich city people, and those who blindly strive to be like them (and therefore the urban-centered lifestyle, which is predominant even in today’s rural areas). The city wants water, food, concrete, iron, steel, asphalt, coal, oil, aluminum, copper, wood, sand, plastic, minerals, silicon, gold, lithium, graphite, and glass — and the city makes damn sure it is going to get them.
A city that doesn’t require the import (read: the exploitation) of materials from the outside might be called sustainable — but this is virtually impossible. This hypothetical city would have to produce a great number of natural goods and services all by itself and completely give up a similar quantity of things, and this would in turn automatically lead to it becoming a semi-rural area, not a city.
We can’t think about helping the environment without having an honest conversation about the future of cities. They are inherently unsustainable: they constantly grow, and as they grow they require an ever-larger area around them to be exploited to satisfy their needs. If we want sustainability, we should reduce the cities’ size and deflate clearly unsustainable levels of population density. This does not mean genocide, it simply means redistribution: returning to the land.
Either way, cities are completely overrated — they are the most ugly and unnatural assembly of monotonous concrete blocks, steel and asphalt, polluted by thousands of exhausts and smokestacks, terribly overcrowded, and ridden with stress- and diet-related disease and the highest levels of alienation possible. Most of the urban population worldwide is there against their will or for lack of alternatives (driven by land theft, displacement, demographic stress, economic depression, and empty promises) and many would love to return to their old life in the countryside if anyhow possible.
There is so little exposure to Nature in the city that a growing number of its inhabitants already feel that humans don’t need the natural world to survive. After all, look at them thriving in the artificial environment they themselves have created! They even contemplate multi-storied vertical farms, so that the city can be completely cut off from the countryside. Then, finally, can the city expand to devour the whole planet.
But once you leave the city for good, it often becomes increasingly obvious that moving back would not be an option.
The longer I live in my garden, the more I dislike going to the city — something that I seem to have in common with Davi Kopenawa. I avoid going there as good as I can, and even the monthly trip to pay the bills is terribly exhausting. Living the simple life means doing things yourself, which makes you a lot stronger physically — but you are only stronger in the environment you’re used to, not in others. In the city I often feel dizzy, light-headed, and the constant noise and smell gives me headaches. I often hold my breath when I drive behind large SUV’s or trucks, because the smell of their exhaust fumes makes me gag with disgust. I feel the city draining my energy, and I can only relax again once I’ve returned to the garden and jumped into the pond to wash off the dust and pollution.
Seeing the masses of people there who have absolutely no idea what’s going on in this world and who don’t care about anything but the tiny little cages, their home, their workplace, their car, their fitness studio, that civilization gifts them with, always makes me sad and angry. How come all those people act without thinking about the long-term consequences? How can they be so stupid? Then I remember that, not long ago, I myself acted rather stupid, without thinking much. Just a mere five years ago, some anti-modernist permaculture farmer might have seen me walking through the city and thought exactly the same. Yet here I am, changed to the point where I sometimes forget how life in civilization makes you feel, and how difficult it is at times. Had I known what to look for, which books to read, whom to ask, and where to search for answers, my quest would have been even shorter. The good thing is: all the information and knowledge is already out there, free for anybody willing to invest a little precious time, and people who are conscious about the pressing environmental issues and see the bigger picture are doing one hell of a job informing people.
If all those people roaming the city would start their own personal journey today, they’d be living better in under half a decade.
City life makes people stressed, weak and unhealthy, yet those who run the cities never stop preaching how wonderful everything is. In excellent Orwellian doublespeak they praise our architects’ creativity, our engineers’ ingenuity, and our construction workers’ strength and skill, as they work to extend the city in all directions and on all axis, horizontally and vertically. And this propaganda sits very deep!
People these days often extol ‘human ingenuity’, marveling at machines, medicines and skyscrapers, like it was them themselves who invented and built them. The ones who are the proudest of our “collective achievements” are often those who have the smallest share in their accomplishment. Anybody priding themselves on ‘human achievements’ is invited to build me a space shuttle, a skyscraper, a satellite, or a smartphone, or even just to find me a local healing plant.
Yes, we can go wherever we want in a matter of hours, yes we can travel to a different continent over the weekend, yes we can order fresh food from halfway around the world, but should we really be proud of all that? Are those really good things?
The very act of staying globally connected comes with a huge carbon price tag. Fossil fuels are required and irreplaceable to push the heavy container ships through the oceans and lift up our airplanes.
New IATA (International Air transport Association) data shows that — environmental conditions permitting — in 20 years the global number of flights will double (as will the number of passengers transported and the number of total aircraft, logically). This is a textbook example of reckless degeneration for entirely superficial and selfish gains, and the exact opposite of the regenerative action our planet needs so desperately.
Sure, all those things seem impressive at first sight. But remove the degenerative globalized economy and the capitalists from the equation, and it becomes very difficult to construct a skyscraper or assemble a smartphone (and why would you, anyway?). Just because some members of our species take part in making them doesn’t mean you and me can be proud of it if we can’t do it ourselves. Most people today can’t even start a fire without matches, yet they talk of themselves as having conquered the planet.
Living regeneratively, small-scale and local, we should be proud of only our own achievements and that of our community, and only if they don’t interfere with Nature’s ecosystems. If you can build your own house from natural materials, heal sick neighbors with herbs from your garden, make durable furniture from bamboo, grow delicious fruit for your family and friends, or make strong bows and straight arrows, you can be damn proud of yourself, and you can be sure people around you would show you their appreciation.
If anything, our economic activity has to break up from the global to the local, human scale.
Only in small-scale local efforts can we find true sustainability.
Other animals and plants live ‘sustainably’ on the long run, since they keep each other’s numbers in balance by feeding on each other and rarely use up more resources than they need. They usually do so instinctively, and if they fail to do so, they will suffer the consequences, which may range from discomfort, over hunger, to death. Present-day hunter-gatherer societies all over the world make use of plants that act as contraceptives to limit population levels.
It is only us modern humans who disturbed this balance with creating a positive feedback loop in which increased food production leads to increased population, which then leads to increased food production again.
A sustainable population level is of course not always linear, but shows some level of oscillation between two extremes — yet every rise is followed by an equal decline. The exponential population explosion of human beings over the last 10,000 years is the complete opposite. If we want sustainability, now a downwards curve has to follow. This might happen through war, genocide, or disaster, fast, far beyond our control, and on unimaginable scale (if civilization is not stopped) — or through lifestyle changes, natural selection, wise decisions, and the use of plants (if we allow Nature to take the steering wheel once more).
Natural selection is a difficult topic that modern civilized humans dislike and try to avoid, but which is ultimately inescapable. Nature selects for sustainability, so sooner or later our current lifestyle will disappear anyway. Natural selection in humans (and in most other animal species) does not mean “survival of the strongest”, it means “survival of the fittest”, as in “survival of the one who fits best in his or her ecological niche”. One reason it is shunned today is our culture’s overblown and pathetic fear of death. Another is because of its eugenic overtone, even though in eugenics it is the human, not Nature, which selects. Hunter-gatherers are definitely subject to natural selection, yet they are not fascist superhumans, but everyday normal people like you and me (although probably quite a bit healthier).
Environmentalist author Derrick Jensen famously wrote that the only really sustainable level of technology (and therefore way of life) was the Stone Age. And this is not far from the truth! If an agricultural society experiences the population boom made possible by surpluses and a carbohydrate-rich diet, they will soon need to expand their arable land (cut down forests) to sustain themselves and their increasingly numerous offspring.
Primitive “Stone Age” people know very well of the dangers of overpopulation, namely the increased competition for limited local resources that might lead to war. This is why in many places they have perfected a lifestyle over the millennia that maintains a certain population density through lifestyle adaptions like extended breastfeeding, shared parenthood (a woman who is almost constantly breastfeeding is less likely to become pregnant, and some tribes like the Huaorani even breastfeed pet dogs and monkeys), and the use of plant medicines that act as antifertility agents.
It is safe to say that very, very few of the solutions proposed so far, neither the majority of UN “Sustainable Development Goals”, nor “green” energy and technology are really sustainable. Even worse, they are degenerative, because they are all based on cities, businesses, the economy, growth, technological progress, and therefore the extraction of resources (read: the destruction of Nature) and the conversion of “natural capital” to digital money. While proposing to reduce our impact on the planet’s ecosystems, they never even dare to propose stopping the machine. But what goes up must come down — and down it will come, whether we choose to dismantle or to collaborate with it.
So far we’ve learned that “sustainable” is often not all that good, that a lot of things that are being called sustainable are actually degenerative, and that “becoming sustainable” will not be enough to avert the coming catastrophe.
We don’t have the luxury to go straight to sustainable — because of all the damage we’ve inflicted upon the planet so far, we have to go through a phase of actively being regenerative before we can settle at a sustainable lifestyle.
Regenerative means restoring topsoil, diversity, habitats and ecosystems, reforesting every place possible, replanting native trees and plants, and rewilding the land and ourselves in the process.
We will have to go through a phase of intensive regeneration before we can settle at ‘sustainable’.
Overall, the transition to a regenerative mode of living (and therefore the collapse of the current system) can happen in a predominantly peaceful manner. People usually behave much more humane in times of crises, as we can observe in places where natural disasters struck. People help and support each other, and any “violent” behavior (such as looting) is usually targeted at concentrated spots of wealth and/or much-needed goods — supermarkets or other stores — which are a manifestation of our culture’s unfair distribution of basic necessities anyway. I won’t dare to make any predictions about trigger-happy cultures like parts of the US, or extremely alienated and overpopulated places like China’s megalopolises.
But, generally speaking, you see people rediscovering their empathy and compassion once crisis hits. Most people are frightened deep down that if they treat somebody bad who’s in need, it will come back at them. When survival is at stake, even starkly differing political views like racism dissolve, since there obviously are more important things to figure out first. People start to matter for who they are and what they do, not for what color their skin is, which party they voted for, or whether they have a penis or not.
We are, as I said before — metaphorically, primatologically and genetically speaking — as much Bonobo as we are Chimpanzee.
While the media undoubtedly tries to scare us as much as possible about the presumably violent alternative to civilization (think about movies like Mad Max, The Survivalist, The Domestics, Hell, The Last Survivors, or What Still Remains), if you look at history, there might be reason not to worry too much. Usually humans have been most violent when civilizations thrived, and Dark Ages weren’t always death and destruction. As I have pointed out elsewhere, James C. Scott has written in his book Against the Grain that dark ages were a time where oppressive systems (city- or nation-states) ceased to exist, taxation stopped, armies dissolved, slaves were freed, and personal freedom flourished. Most people simply returned to a more self-sufficient way of living.
In the 400-year-long dark age that followed the collapse of the Greek Empire literacy was lost, so what exactly happened in this period remains subject to the imagination of civilized historians — yet there is ample reason to believe that the people in this period lived lives of independence and freedom, without fear of war and conquest, and were more connected to their immediate human community and their natural environment.
What do we really need to live? We need good, healthy food, clean water and fresh air. We need a shelter to protect us from the elements, and a social group to correspond and cooperate with. We don’t need smartphones, microwaves, computers, factories, airplanes, containerships, or cities.
Bruno Manser wrote in his diary during his stay with the Penan tribe:
“My experiment leads me back to the origin, to a life of abstinence and modesty. A healthy environment and enough food are the external conditions for happiness — he who complains with a full stomach and in a peaceful environment will still complain even if he owns half the world.”
We are desperately trying to make city life more sustainable, without realizing that it is the very concept of cities that is inherently unsustainable. It would be much easier to give up on trying to improve upon a project doomed to fail, and start not with degenerative cities, but with regenerative forests.
Nature, the ultimate regenerative system, would recover and thrive anyway if we humans were to disappear. We can’t live sustainably when we try to dominate Nature, but only if we find our place in the ecosystem without disturbing it any more than necessary.