Mar 3, 2021
Giving New Meaning to Green
Towards the green world for all in which we all long to live in and play our part.
MORE AND MORE WE ARE BECOMING AWARE of the severity of the ecological crises looming on our horizon. As our collective awareness grows, more and more we long to do something. Alarmed and well meaning, many of us seek to ‘help the planet’, to live ‘sustainably’ or to ‘protect nature’. To do so we’re striving to go ‘organic’, ‘vegan’, ‘natural’, ‘net-zero’ and in particular, to go ‘green’.
But how do we actually “help the planet”? What does it mean to protect ‘nature’? What are we actually ‘sustaining’? Does going organic, natural or net-zero actually make the difference we long for? What in fact, does ‘green’ really mean?
While we may all agree that rescinding our old grey ways is the most pressing issue of our times, with a closer look, discerning the green way forward isn’t so easy.
Although a process may claim to be organic, vegan, sustainable, circular or carbon-neutral all too often our intuition urges a closer look. How do we evaluate an organic product air-shipped around the world? Or a natural product wrapped in plastic? An ebook purchased on Amazon? How do we evaluate green-intended technologies such as electric cars, bio-plastics and industrial wind turbines that also have clear grey impacts?
But more fundamentally, what do we make of the concepts beneath all these claims — ideas like ‘the circular economy’, ‘zero-waste’ and ‘net-zero’ that now dominate corporate prose? How can we be sure our enterprises, technologies and concepts are truly in the interest of the biosphere? And, as some skeptics point out 1 2, is this even possible in an age where petrol-capitalism subsumes our best intentions and endeavours?
Alas, having worked for the last ten years on both the western and eastern fronts of plastic pollution, I’ve come to question much of what I once thought to be green.
Maybe you have too.
Investigative journalism has decisively debunked so many of the ‘green’ things we once esteemed. From biomass energy to palm-oil products; from industrial recycling to oxy-degradeable plastics, it turns out many of things we were once sure were green, were in fact a dark shade of grey.
Clearly, discerning what actually is in the Earth’s interest is not the role of business. Nor of politicians. And certainly not of billionaires. All too often vested interests run deep. Nor is such broad discernment the domain of scientists focused on specific patterns and phenomena.
Rather, discerning the meaning of green is the realm of philosophy and, and more specifically, ethics.
But perhaps even more so, it is the realm of the forest and the tree — and those of our ancestors who have lived closest to them. After all, if there’s anyone or any ‘thing’, that can teach us about ecological contribution, it is those who have already done so.
Growing up in the land of the Kwanlin Dün and the Wet’suweten (in what is now NorthWestern Canada), I had an early observation of such living. More recently, residing among the Igorot people of the Filipino Cordilleras, I experienced it again1. There, the Igorots have developed an ecological ethos based on their observation of the creatures around them. Over the generations they gleaned deep ecological insights. Thus guided, their cultures steadily enriched the cycles of life around them.
While living with the Igorots, I came to understand that we lack the a similar ethics to make sense of our place in the biosphere today.
The ethics we do have (laws, religion, sustainability, UN goals) derive their perspective from a view of human interests, human rights, human-time-scale and human-space. Alas, precisely because our ethics are so human-centered they have little to do with the interests of the Earth and all its other life. We lack a clear understanding of what contributing to the biosphere entails and what green actually means. As such, our old ethics are unsuited for making the impartial ecological evaluations that we so need today.
To guide our growing planet passion, we require a means to make impartial and decisive ecological evaluations: a set of parameters, that can temper, tame and even turn inside-out the petro-capitalism of our civilizational moment.
Rather than an ethics centered on humanity’s limited experience of the Earth, we require an ethics based on the Earth’s broad billion year experience of life: An ethics that honors ancestral indigenous wisdom yet accounts for our modern grasp of the cosmos. An ethics that resonates with those of us reverent of a religion and that fully satisfies our scientists. An ethics robust enough for a comprehensive, multi-faceted, academic evaluation, yet simple enough for a child to grasp and apply.
But most importantly, we require an ethics that applies equally to plants, animals and ecosystems, just as it applies to our own processes, acts and enterprises.
Only this way can we transcend our human-centeredness and see our own processes side by side that of our fellow creatures. Only this way can we ever hope to aspire to the great planetary contributions that our neighbouring organisms and ecosystems are quietly making day after day, year after year.
In the chapters ahead I will present a new theory of green based on the character of our common home. This Earthen ethics will be founded on the ways that the Earth has transformed our once barren planet into the thriving biosphere we know today.
I ask the reader to buckle in. The Earth’s example sets the bar at heights hitherto unimagined by most of us, and will shake the foundations of many an intention, investment and enterprise.
As we shall see, the way forward isn’t so much about fixing our current technologies — nor even about inventing new ones. Rather, it is about grasping principles that only just now, in this very instant of the planet’s stellar story, do we finally have the vantage to view and grasp. With the Earth’s wisdom in hand we can then step with full confidence towards that green world for all, in which we all long to live.
NEXT: That Green World for All
This was the first installment of An Earthen Ethics. Be sure to follow me to receive the unfolding series.
Russell Maier is based in Banjar Sumampan, Bali, Indonesia, where he and his partner track, account and disclose their ecological impacts. In 2020, their monthly household plastic consumption was 15% of the Indonesian per capita average while their household CO2 emissions were 46.5% of the Indonesian per capita average. Over the past five years the percentage of their home space open to biodiversity has increased from 12% to 49% and the number of species that they account for has increased by 65%. In 2020, they household removed 2200% more plastic out of the biosphere than they consumed and produced.
A full accounting of Russell’s household ecological impacts can be found in his 2020 enterprise regenerative report at www.russs.net/earthen.
1“…capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its ‘system of equivalence’ which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value” See the work of Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, Is there No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
2“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” Slavoj Zizek
