Meditating as the climate changes too fast
A Buddhist take on Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life.
The orangutans on the Indonesian island of Sumatra are a color halfway between orange and red. It’s a deep, beautiful color, especially in direct sunlight. When it caught my eye I was exhausted, not in Sumatra — I’ve never been — but in New York City, last spring. My mind was scattered after walking Manhattan all day, and I needed detachment, which the TV in my hotel room offered.
On HBO, an orangutan swung through rain forest canopy as a journalist described its fate. The Sumatran orangutan is critically endangered because the rainforest across the island is being chopped down and burned. Only in the past three decades, more than half of the world’s third largest rainforest has been timbered to produce paper products. Much of this cleared land has been replanted with rows of oil palm trees, the fruit of which produces an oil used in processed foods and household goods like toothpaste. Increasing demand for cheap palm oil is compelling companies to clear and burn more and more forest, not only in Indonesia, but across the Global South.
But the Sumatran orangutan isn’t the only casualty. Because some of the ground under the rainforest is a combustible soil called peat, the process releases more carbon into the atmosphere than if the forest burned alone. Peat fires recently moved Indonesia up two spots to the world’s fourth-largest greenhouse gas emitter — in a span of just weeks.
So much for detachment. Should I buy new toothpaste? The earth is dying as I watch TV in one of the world’s most modern, high-energy cities. I walked onto the balcony and did what I’ve started to do when I notice that I’m suffering. I sat, felt the energy in my body, and followed by breath. Below me, Chinatown was remarkably quiet.
Climate change is so real that I find myself trying to ignore it. I avoid all news of melting ice. Last year was the hottest on record in terms of global average temperature — by far. In the past three decades, the number of living corals covering Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — the earth’s biggest single structure made by living organisms — has been cut in half. Faced with these facts I can only shrug inside. What can be done? Sitting on that balcony and staying with my frustration was skillful, but we won’t meditate our way out of environmental crisis. Buying different toothpaste won’t save us either. Many people are working hard to raise the alarm, but as a society we are confused. We can’t agree about the cause of the problem let alone a collective answer.
Most scientists agree that human activity is causing most of the change — some even use a term for the modern human era: “the Anthropocene.” While there is a certain political value in a narrative that says that we, humans, are changing the climate — as opposed to God or mere chance — blaming all of humanity is too abstract, as well as unskillful. That narrative increases our suffering. What can anyone do if everyone is the problem?
In his new book, Capitalism in the Web of Life, sociologist Jason W. Moore takes on this confusing question, or more so, shows that it’s the wrong one to ask. His essential claim — that humans are not separate from nature, that we and nature are interconnected — should resonate with a Buddhist audience. The environment isn’t something out there to save or conserve, it is all around and inside of us. We are a part of nature. Fair enough, but why do we tend to see nature as a separate thing? Why do we feel like we have to save it? Why do palm oil corporations see money in Sumatra instead of precious rainforest? Because society is organized in such a way that compels us to. We can call this organization capitalism, a taboo subject, especially in the U.S. — though, common phrases like ‘consumer culture’ and ‘modern, high-speed society’ are often referring to the effects of capitalism.
As an economic and social system, capitalism favors a particular perspective on nature — that it can be mapped, counted, and above all, controlled. This view assumes that nature is separate from us; that tomatoes have a price or that Indonesian land would be more productive if it were planted with oil palm trees. This is Moore’s deeper claim — that capitalism separates us from nature — and I think it deserves our attention. It’s a “mindful” way to think about climate change and what to do about it. Admitting that humans living in certain relationships are changing the climate gives us something to work on. We can have some of what Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa called “basic sanity” about our frustration — we can sit with it — but we can also work to change our relationships as they really are. As Moore writes, “Shut down a coal plant, and you slow global warming for a day; shut down the relations that made the coal plant, and you can stop it for good.”
To grasp the power of this perspective, which Moore and his colleagues call “world-ecology,” we need to see capitalism in a way that isn’t loaded. Like any taboo, the word brings up fear and blame. This is because capitalism is often described as an economic system ruled by greed. But greed is a symptom, not the root of the system. The root, or what makes the system churn, is a certain arrangement of human relationships. Most of us work for a living; some of us own a business; and very few of us own enough property to put others to work for us. In our society, this arrangement produces the value we need to acquire the necessities of life — food, shelter, and so on. And relative to all of human existence, this arrangement is very new to the world stage.
For Moore, this arrangement has everything to do with our relationship with the rest of nature. One way to describe the high-speed, modern world is that it began with a sudden rise in the amount of effort or work we could offload onto tools, or technology. Humans have always put tools to work in our place. To help our stomachs digest meat, humans learned to control fire. Instead of growing more hair, we used animal fur to keep warm. Only a few centuries ago this offloading of effort skyrocketed with machines powered by steam, electricity, and fossil fuels. But with the Industrial Revolution something else changed. A certain class in society, capitalists — what we could call “business owners”— had become dominant in Western Europe, especially in England, which was a world power. Feudalism was giving way to capitalism. In feudal society, rulers had used political and religious power to force peasants to work in their place, to grow their food and maintain their land. With capitalists came a different practice of offloading effort from one human to another. Instead of being forced to work like peasants, or even slaves, workers are paid a wage or salary in exchange for working for the owner of the property needed to do that work. The owner then sells the product of that work in the market for profit.
Scottish philosopher Adam Smith called this new organization “the division of labor,” and claimed it spread effort around more evenly than feudalism had, raising the living standard for all of society. In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore favors the thought of someone that lived in the century after Smith. Karl Marx was also amazed by capitalism’s gifts but saw struggle in this new way to offload effort — a struggle between workers and those who paid them to work, over how the effort being saved by the division of labor gets divvied up. For Marx, capitalists weren’t just offloading work, they were exploiting workers, and this struggle between classes was the heart of human activity and history.
But for class struggle to even take place, for investments to be made and wages to be paid, there must be nature. There must be land, food, energy, and raw materials like wood, cotton, and steel. Marx seemed aware of this, but Moore puts nature front and center. Capitalism requires the appropriation of nature. For example, we wouldn’t produce as many fruits and vegetables as we do today without the work of honeybees. The Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened without millions of exploited workers but also without tons of coal, iron, and steel. And also without early America’s soil, which had built up its fertility over thousands of years. Our concepts of “the economy” or “society” ignore this work provided by the earth. The same can be said of the unpaid effort provided by African slaves who worked that soil. Both — nature and slave labor — are ignored in the conventional narrative of how the U.S. rose to global dominance.
And how could that dominance continue today without, say, cheap production — of iPhones, cars, etc. — in places like Southeast Asia? At first glance, the conditions and consequences of this cheap production appear unrelated: factory workers are being exploited; meanwhile, air pollution in cities like Beijing is getting out of hand. The world-ecology perspective allows us to see these as parts of a holistic process. The atmosphere is acting as a “dump” for the greenhouse gases emitted by the factories. And its work as a dump is being appropriated, meaning it goes unpaid, or unvalued by capitalism’s economic decision-making. Of course, the atmosphere could never be paid. The point is, what we consider “the economy” is and always has been inseparable from the rest of nature. And therefore capitalism is not just an economic system but a way of organizing nature — an organization that separates us and delivers most of its value to a small percentage of society. By including nature’s work in all of these concepts — the economy, society, and humanity — Moore gives us context for our interconnection with nature.
This perspective has profound meaning for climate change. It clears space for new ways to think about an issue like palm oil. The corporations slashing and burning the Sumatran rainforest are not just greedy; they are part of a global economy that must appropriate nature to continue to grow. They are following the rules in that sense. This perspective focuses our attention away from anyone in particular — ourselves included — and towards the system. How we engage this attention depends on the specific conditions in our community, so there’s no panacea. But we must build a harmonious and sustainable organization based on our interconnection with nature.
This interconnection strikes me as compatible with the Buddhist conception of the awakened state of mind, an unattached relationship with every moment that passes. In Present Moment Wonderful Moment, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes that relationship this way:
“When we see fresh vegetables, we can see the sun in them…and not just the sun, but thousands of other phenomena as well. For example, if there were no clouds there would be no rain water. Without water, air, and soil, there would be no vegetables. The vegetables are the coming together of many conditions far and near.”
As we disrupt the dominant organization and build new ones, we can’t forgot the wisdom that arises in each present moment. In a sense, the answer — our interconnection with the rest of nature — is already there, we just have to clear away our many layers of conditioning to find it.
This post first appeared on futuredebris.com.
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