Loving that part of nature we call human
The pain of witnessing the relentless destruction of our beautiful planet has caused me so much heartache and disbelief, so much exasperation and despair. Many times it has been easier to look away, to not see it, to hide. I have asked myself:
‘What kind of species are we, to have caused such harm’?
The answer to that question morphed into a sense of numbness and a lack of passion for any kind of activism, seeing it all as pointless, as Rearranging the Deck Chairs, as I wrote in my last piece.
I did not know what to do. But the desire to do something never went away and reading and writing about Collapse is for me, part of that desire for sense making and coming to terms with our predicament.
The crushing sense of guilt and shame I have felt from being part of a species so irrevocably stupid as to destroy it’s living home, I now see is a result of having lived only in a modern industrial consumer society and having no roots in a culture who have known a different way of being, a different story.
Instead, as many of us do, I have turned to the long and complex history of human societies for answers and a better understanding of humanity.
I share my thoughts on this as I notice that some people might be stuck in that same dark place, which is fair enough, but overall I don’t think helpful in figuring out how we are to live and respond in this Age of Collapse.
One of the more outspoken anticipators of collapse on social media captured this sentiment well, when he tweeted:
“Misanthropy, and even more so misanthropes, get a bad reputation. Anyone who has come to hate their own species is coming from a place of love for all life forms, anti-speciesism, and truth. We are a plague. Are you brave enough to handle that? Can you own it?”
I will NOT own this stance, instead I see there is a different kind of courage. It is one that does not cope through numbness and hatred of our species. It does not require flawed stories of ecological inevitability to avoid feelings of shame. And it does not resort to believing one has superior knowledge or character than most of humanity.
There is new scholarship that provides substantial backing for such a view and invites us into a far more socially and politically engaged way of life as a result.
One example is the new book Breaking Together, by ‘collapsologist’ Professor Jem Bendell. In the book, he offers a critique of some of the popular, yet misleading, ideas amongst people who anticipate societal collapse. One of those is the idea of the inevitability of collapse due to humans being no smarter than algae in a petri dish, who, with an influx of energy, explode their population and die off. This simplistic rendering of overshoot and exhausting of ecological carrying capacity is dismantled in a number of ways.
— First, he shows that various species in nature actually moderate their breeding behaviours to regulate their own population numbers and therefore it is a strange choice to equate humans to algae (or a plague) rather than those lifeforms that are far more like us.
— Second, by the examination of First Peoples who lived in sustainable ways over millennia on various continents before European invasion, he shows that overshoot stories render invisible this complex history and displace attention from the particular destructiveness of modern societies.
He even explains how some ancient cultures already had access to fossil fuels but chose to use them in moderate ways. An example is given of Australian Aboriginal peoples, the country where I live, who inhabited the area now known as Lake Macquarie in NSW, previously called Nikinba meaning ‘place of coal’ and how they used coal sustainably. This reminded me of an example given by Paul Kingsnorth in his recent Substack writing on ‘The Machine’, that showed
“fairly advanced technological knowledge can be traced back to the earliest civilisations. The difference between us and them was that they often chose not to use it.”
The reason they chose not to use it, was so as not to anger the gods with their hubris. Whereas together, science and technology in our culture has become the Religion of Progress and its use is seen as our salvation and answer to all life’s problem.
People like Vandana Shiva, a shero of mine, calls science Patriarchy’s Project and she has fought relentlessly over decades to keep the science of GMOs out of her country.
Back to Professor Bendell’s book — in it he also debunks the often cited “parable of the tribes” theory and the “maximum power theory”, which was fascinating to me, as I have seen such theories used to argue that societal collapse was predestined and inevitable; a recent article on resilience.net by Tom Murphy illustrates my point. It is a complex discussion, but one that many of us intuit is important in sensemaking around collapse.
Bendell draws upon recent studies to refute the arguments that humans are inherently destructive. For instance, the argument from journalist George Monbiot that the loss of megafauna was due to humans rather than other natural factors is shown to be a subjective choice between a range of science on the probable causes.
The book draws upon David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent work from The Dawn of Everything (the same book Tom Murphy reviews) to highlight that not all societies chose to live in (eventually collapsing) urban settlements, which have been subjectively chosen as the pinnacles of ‘civilisation’ by scholars steeped in modern culture. This shows how more scholars are expanding their appreciation of other cultures and ancient cultures.
In his book Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta invites the reader to engage in what he calls a ‘thought experiment’, to see how the language, symbols, frames and narratives of modernity have shaped our perception of stone age people to automatically bring up an image in our mind created by our culture which is false and maintains a ‘power over’ paradigm. He asks the reader:
“If Palaeolithic lifestyles were so basic and primitive, how did humans evolve with trillions of potential neural connections in the brain, of which we now only use a small fraction? What kinds of sophisticated lifestyles would be needed to evolve such a massive brain over hundreds of thousands of years? What kind of nutritional abundance would be needed to develop such an organ, made mostly out of fat? How does the narrative of harsh survival in a hostile landscape align with this fact? If our prehistoric lives were so violent, hard and savage, how could we have evolved to have such soft skin, limited strength and delicate parts?”
In a similar vein, Bendell draws upon the work of indigenous scholar Lyla June, in outlining the evidence for complex forms of horticulture tens of thousands of years ago. He concludes that humanity was in fact a ‘wild gardening species before we became an agricultural one.’ It was a phrase that warmed my heart, as someone who has found much solace in gardening and foraging to connect to the feral, if not wild part of my nature — recognising that I am still a civilisation addict through and through.
Taken together, this recent scholarship on ancient societies and indigenous cultures has emboldened my view that societal collapse was not predestined. Instead, our possible role as a custodial species was wounded deeply at some point in history meaning we find ourselves in the horrible mess we are in today.
If you live a middle-class life in industrial consumer societies, then feelings of guilt, shame or blame may be natural, I know I have had them and still struggle with them. However, the response to such feelings is not to adopt incorrect explanations of how such destruction of the planet came about.
Instead Bendell offers us a pathway for moving from “repentance to radicalisation.”
That is what I particularly value in the book Breaking Together — it builds upon these ideas to outline a new political consciousness for the collapse-aware. He says his aim is to help more of us “to live meaningful and helpful lives in an era of collapse.” He believes that for that to happen means we must not avoid, even if painful, questions about “why this happened and what to learn from that, what is core to humanity and society going forward, what are inspiring examples of people’s responses, and what is it that we will need to resist as elites respond in bad ways.”
The book therefore contains a warning for the environmental movement. Bendell explains how it has been clinging to:
“the story of progress within modern societies, whereby we must become more civilised, more modern, in order to protect the planet… That view embodies a misanthropic assumption that humans are inherently bad for nature, and only by heroically using technology and social control will nature have a better chance, along with our species. It ignores the real causes of our predicament, while encouraging the ego of the modern saviour.”
Anticipating critiques from what he describes as the ‘ecomodern’ ideology that has come to dominate environmentalism, he states that:
“The future of both humanity and life on Earth is not threatened by people over-romanticising past or indigenous cultures, but by people defending the ideology of the establishment institutions that oversee global ecocide. The fact that Indigenous peoples now live on lands where 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity is concentrated, while only accounting for 4% of the global population, can invite some humility, respect, curiosity and solidarity.”
In response to George’s question in the tweet I quoted at the outset, I would reply as follows…
It would be speciesism to love nature but not that part of it we call human. We modern humans have been manipulated to believe we are separate from nature and needing to fight with it. We have also been manipulated to think our societies are the only social formation worthy of defining the human experience. The ‘we’ who destroys is made of you and me, not all humanity. We do that because we are oppressed. Are you brave enough to handle that? Can you own it?
This oppression I now see clearly is a result of the Expansionist Monetary System throughout the history of Imperial Modernity.
One of the footnotes hidden away in the remarkably well referenced book, Breaking Together, goes to an article here on Medium by Miki Kashtan titled Why Capitalism Cannot be Redeemed.
My brother told me about this article, which is a 28-minute read and has 44 reasons why capitalism cannot be redeemed. My brother wrote to me and said:
I’m just blown away by this article. I’m so, so grateful that it exists. It really gets to the root of the predicament. Sorry, just had to tell someone even though it past 2am in the middle of the night. It was linked from Jem’s book. Footnote 654.
Thanks Bro!
I believe it takes courage to own this view, that it was NOT inevitable, because then we must continue to remain politically engaged, whatever that looks like for you and me in this Age of Collapse.
