To Solve the Climate and Extinction Crises, Societies Must Find the Path of Mindful Development
We must ditch the colonial model of development in favor of one that recognizes our dependence on the communities around us, human and natural.
My greatest hope for the new decade is that societies find ways to develop mindfully and let go of old colonial patterns of development. Many people are calling for new ways of approaching our societal and ecological crises, but at the same time there are many signs that we are stuck in old ways of thinking that prevent us from seeing real solutions to the present crisis.
Last week I watched the first episode of Netflix’s series Our Planet, which starts with a reference to our first moon landing in 1969 accompanied by the wise voice of David Attenborough:
“For the very first time, we looked back at our own planet. Since then, the human population has more than doubled. This series will celebrate the natural wonders that remain and reveal what must be preserved to ensure people and nature thrive.”
This all sounds very inspiring, but the idea that we just need to “preserve” the remaining parts of nature is really an old-school “fortress conservation” mindset that has so far been completely inadequate at stopping the hemorrhaging of Earth’s species. The reference to the doubling of our human population conjures an image of rapacious, ever-multiplying humans who are daily assaulting nature. The “war on nature” is a narrative we are all familiar with, and the implied solution is that if only we cared more about protecting nature we would be able to save the planet. However, by putting the focus “out there” (on nature) and taking for granted that rising human population necessarily means more destruction of nature, this thinking completely ignores the real problem — that we have an exploitative colonialistic economic model that has persisted over centuries and is based on mindless consumption and exploitation of people and resources. This system reflexively seeks to obtain, extract, and destroy every resource it comes across, including the places we thought were already protected.
Simple calls to “protect” nature also ignore that many of the most biologically important places on Earth are within developing countries (e.g. Brazil, Peru, Democratic Republic of Congo) that need to develop economically in order to provide basic services and increase the quality of life of their citizens. Calls to conserve more of nature puts the argument within the false dichotomy of complete exploitation or complete protection that is characteristic of colonial thinking.
The question should not be whether these countries get to develop but how they develop. Scientists and others have put forward many ideas of what we need to do to going forward, but I have never heard anyone put it into a coherent framework or acknowledge that what they are proposing is actually a totally new system. This is disappointing because the true appeal of colonial capitalism is that it offers a coherent narrative of how to see the world (nature needs to be “tamed” and “developed,” men are “naturally” the heads of their households and politics, etc), and the only way to defeat a narrative is to replace it with a different one.
In April 2019 a group of scientists issued a call for a Global Deal for Nature that includes the steps that would be necessary to stop the Sixth Mass Extinction, protect the Earth’s biological diversity, and maximize the utilization of nature-based solutions to achieve our most ambitious goals under the Paris climate agreement (limiting global temperature rise to less than 1.5°C). The plan contains three areas of work:
First, protect at least 30% of the Earth’s surface by 2030 rising to 50% protected by 2050, across the full range of Earth’s 846 eco-regions, in order to maintain the world’s biological diversity. Second, mitigate climate change by protecting especially carbon-rich landscapes (e.g. tundra and boreal biomes, Congo Basin peat swamps, and Bornean forests). This also includes recognizing the central role of indigenous lands by supporting keeping these “lands intact — for hunting areas, protection of traditional lifestyles, or other features — and [providing] a mechanism to assist these communities with securing tenure rights.”
Third, minimize major threats to ecosystems by engaging in smarter development. This includes, but is not limited to, stopping destruction of intact habitats for agriculture and instead intensifying agricultural production on degraded lands and stopping food waste to meet the world’s rising food demand. We also need to subject major transnational road projects to international planning in order to minimize their impacts on biodiversity and maintain ecological connectivity; cancel and halt construction of medium to large dams on the world’s rivers and maintain two-thirds of the headwaters of all the world’s major rivers undammed; prevent illegal hunting and stop illegal trade in plants and animals; stop the production and use of the most damaging commercial toxins, and test newly developed toxins (e.g. herbicides) that are less damaging; and move away from our take-make-use-dispose linear economy to a circular economy “in which resources do not become waste but instead are recovered and regenerated at the end of each service life.”
The Global Deal for Nature includes habitat protection as a crucial component, but it really goes beyond that to start to re-envision our development activities to exhibit greater sensitivity to the processes and limits of nature. I would go one step further and say that we need nature-based agriculture, where our crop systems mimic the local natural environment and reduce the use of artificial inputs through increased diversity. In fact, we need nature-based solutions in all aspects of development. By nature-based solutions I mean biomimicry (using nature as the “model, measure, and mentor” for all our designs) and using both scientific and indigenous knowledge to maximize the well-being of ecosystems and act as their caretaker even while conducting the human activities that are necessary to improve our quality of life.
Mindful development should be based on the recognition that our quality of life depends on the quality of our environment (including the people and natural world around us). It should require us to be consciously aware of the impacts of our activities on nature and human beings, and to plan our activities in ways that minimize harm and maximize the potential of rich socio-ecological systems to regenerate, thrive, and continue to provide invaluable services to the world. This is the exact opposite of the colonial model of mindless consumption which is based on the premise that self-interest is all that matters and there will always be more “frontier” to use up and exploit.
Or, as Wendell Berry put it in the essay “The Native Hill”:
We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world — to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity — our own capacity for life — that is stifled by our arrogant assumptions; the creation itself is stifled.
We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.”
Mindful development does not have to be selfless development — rather, it is an evolution of economic thought that acknowledges that by looking out for the best interests of our communities and of nature (in addition to paying attention to our own needs), we are in fact looking out for our own interests and those of our children. It is marked by awareness, intention, cultivation of our relationships between humans and with nature, and planning for the future.
In a sense, we all need to recognize that we are native to the specific places we live and to Earth. It is only by respecting and cultivating the “soil” around us (human and natural environments) that we can thrive.
Scientists are already saying that to solve the climate emergency we need to shift our economic metrics away from GDP to metrics of health and human wellbeing. Indigenous peoples have been telling us for centuries that the first step to respecting ourselves is to learn to respect the lands, waters, and air — and other cultures — around us.
Lastly, the word mindfulness also evokes spiritual awakening and shifting one’s focus away from an ego-driven view of the self to understanding oneself at a deeper level, including as part of a greater whole and in interaction with the rest of life. We have a lot to learn from each other and especially from indigenous peoples on this journey. As Australian indigenous activist Teila Watson put it in an op-ed in The Guardian:
“My understanding of the Murri perspective of humanity means that country is taken care of, in order to sustain life. I believe this is connected to the fact that many different Indigenous groups across the continent and the world have creation stories that relate directly to land and/or waters which ensures that all land is held sacred in its production of life. This relationship between people and land lays the foundations for the relationship between people. We cannot treat land with disrespect without disrespecting ourselves and each other.”
We live in an era when we are seeing the flaring up of old colonial patterns, partly because the system is so under threat from changing demographics, changing societal norms, increased international cooperation, and other factors. Now is the time to keep moving forward and not regress to harmful ways of thinking or outdated, simplistic political identities. We also need to call the present system by its true name — it’s not fascism, it’s colonialism. We should not be operating our societies on economic models and norms that derive from the 17th to 19th centuries. It’s time to put the old colonial system to rest and breathe a sigh of relief and contemplation so that we can start the exciting work of the next stage of economic and societal development.
Cover image: “When sunrays touched the shoreline” by Guy Mayer. Copyrighted under Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 2.0.
