Please be advised that what you are about to read is heavy and of a serious nature. It is meant to make you think about what your life is all about. If you experience a realization or awakening from it, then my words are not in vain.
A Short Essay Of My Thoughts Of What Was and What Could Be For Future Generations….It Is All About Choice.
There was a time in my life when I would have this reoccurring dream. I would be sitting in my car, music blaring. Slowly making my way forward through a fast food drive-
thru. As I was receiving my change and handed my burger and fries, there off in the distance a bright flash, a rising cloud. And as the full force of the nuclear blast washed over me, as the icy cold of my over turned coke soaked into my jeans, I would think to myself….What A Way To Go.
Part 1 (Waking On The Train)
I was born in Canada, on the sleepy shores of Georgian Bay. I was raised in the arms of a rural family, starting off struggling. I was born into warmth and a sense of place, a sense of security and plenty to eat. I was born into stories, stories of the value of work and the right way to live. Stories about god and country, community, loyalty, steadfast and resolve. Stories about the role and place of humans on this planet. Stories about our relationship to something we called nature. I was born into stories. No one told me about these stories, they
didn’t have to. They were the air I breathed, the water in which I swam, the land on which I walked. They were all around me. We
didn’t even know they were stories, we just thought it was the way things were.
My world was a playground. There were lakes to swim in, boats to row, fish to catch, parades to watch, trails to hike, presents to open and family to share it all with.
It was a magical land, Popsicles, pies on birthdays, warm milk. The earth was our merry-go-round, our monkey bars and if we just
didn’t look down, the world would be just fine.
I was born half way up the population explosion. I was born on the slope of rising CO2 levels. I was born in the foothills of mass extinction. I was born on the rocky rise of oil production. I was born facing forward, each step forward, upward into the face of progress. A step into a vast and glorious human future. We were moving on up; there was no looking back. Step by step we went to conquer the mountain. But what we were climbing was not what it was. Rather than rising up natural slopes, we were rising on imbalance and short sightedness. In our efforts to progress, to succeed, to overcome, to strive, to change, to manage, we wielded huge new forces across the globe. We walked as giants upon the earth; unaware of the footprints we left behind.
I have walked that path, unaware of my own big feet, enacting the stories of our culture. Not stopping long enough to feel the instability of the slope under foot.
In the 80s the news of the hole in the ozone and climate change first hit me and I began to shake. I stopped and looked around me for the first time. I got scared, I got involved and then the shaking subsided or rather, I just got use to it. Life got more complex with my personal struggles and there was still more climbing to do. So I continued to climb. The tremors were still there under my feet. At night I slept not fitfully, clenched with worries, my dreams assaulted by vague rumblings from the future. In my dreams I would stand at the pinnacle of the present and survey the surrounding terrain and it did not look as I thought it would.
A faint howling in the distance pierces the night, Monsters we have created, lumbering to life are heading even now toward our village. Nuclear weapons biding their time, reaching their purposes unfulfilled as hopeful fingers tremble on near buttons. Bunker busters and tactical nukes, terrorist bombs and suitcases filled with death. Power plant accidents and making waste that could never be rendered harmless. Plutonium launched into space and rockets know to explode. And depleted uranium poisoning the battlefield depopulating the land. Chemical warheads and biological
black magic. Anthrax and smallpox and plague. Enough to wipe out the cities, enough to wipe out the world.
And they don’t care who lets them out as long as they get to play. Other
nasties lurched towards us on their own, old versions and new ones. Ebola,
SARS, swine flu, bird flu and HIV and AIDS. The rebound of tuberculosis, malaria and typhus. Mad cow and cancers that eat away at our lungs, our brains, our breasts our testicles and our ovaries.
The new Monsters peer over the horizon. Good intentions spliced into blind arrogance and numbing greed. Chemicals that make our food bug free, choking our life, our DNA.
Frankenfoods and terminator seeds, herbicide tolerance and pesticide laced crops. Patented life that is barely tested, quietly ticking, let loose upon the land. As if their creators, having looked at the world and managed to learn nothing at all. The Monster’s eye grows frenzied, chemicals in our land, our sky, our rain, our rivers, our food, our bodies, our babies.
Rising male infertility rates and
chemtrails and ozone depletion. Rivers dammed and salmon doomed. Topsoil loss and fertilizer runoff. Huge oceanic dead zones and depleted fisheries and the ghosts of silent whales scraping over the corpses of silent coral reefs.
The Monsters advance and the forests collapse under their feet, leaving Indigenous cultures homeless, battered, homesick or dead.
Disrupting water and oxygen cycles turning soil into deserts. As tigers and falcons and tree frogs and other species stumble down the path to extinction. Their distant voices lost in the chatter of the chainsaw and coughing insults of bulldozers.
And all the while the climate is changing. Angry summers and persistent floods, belligerent blizzards, grudging droughts and hissing hurricanes. With poles warming and ice shelves calving, permafrost slumping and glaciers receding. Sea levels rising and big cities sinking. As ocean currents halt and super storms gust, deserts expand, rabbits run, locust hoard, the ants march, the mosquitoes feast and rodents overrun. The balance undone. It leaves crops destroyed, diseases vectored, war and rioting and looting. The ocean turns acid as corals and plankton and shellfish dissolve. The disruption of the food chains, the collapsing of ecosystems tonight on the weather channel.
Watch it now while you can because oil is peaking with no clear replacements. Production will falter as the demand keeps increasing and the price which is rising now will just keep on rising. Imagine the impact of the global economy, to the truckers and farmers, to your neighbours, your enemy, yourself. Watch the bidding war change from the trade floor to battlefields. Watch the pentagon plan and the patriots act. Go look out the window; do you feel a draft coming?
World populations fed by the input of oil. The world population is bursting at the seams.
We are poisoning the air, the water, the land. We are driving a high-speed train down a set of tracks that we thought had no end, but are about to realize were never finished. We are taking the planet and trillions upon trillions of its inhabitants with us. And all of this is wrapped tightly in a culture of denials and absurdities so complex, so powerful that we can barely see it through the smog.
The Monsters are screeching at the village edge, so huge and so horrible that we cannot bare to look at them. And we, bound in a cultural straight jacket of our own making, slumber on as they draw near. We are working jobs we hate, consuming products that do not fulfill, distracting ourselves as best we can with television, drugs, food, sex and entertainments. We hope that our leaders will find some answers. Awakening in the still hours of the early morning to the shapeless realization that they will not.
Beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep…..
ahhhhh what a nightmare.
There has always been a part of me that has suspected that we would see the end of world, as we know it in our lifetime. It seemed built into the situation, a certainty of population dynamics. The inevitable end to Mr. Malthus musings. (The writer of an essay. “The principle of population.”)
The world looked insane to me, but nobody else seemed to notice so I buried my thoughts and muddled on. Deep inside this was tearing me to pieces. I remember lying awake at night thinking of friends and family and the knowing terror of their futures, but I left it in my heart, hit the snooze button and slept a while longer.
Then I read two books, Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and The Culture of Make Believe by Derrik Jensen. It helped me to recognize the stories of our culture, the beliefs and assumptions and fables that have shaped our lives. The
fairytales we have told ourselves and the madness that we have made manifest in the world. Quinn’s book spoke of Hitler and his domination which held a nation captive, of the people, the
gypsys, the poor, the Jew, the average German and the order that went along with it all only to be denounced and separated from the glorious end that was the third Reich. We too today, that live inside the global culture are captive to the stories. Stories that surround us like the air we breathe. Stories that we enact at our own peril. Stories that threaten the community of life itself.
Have you heard the one about humans being separate from nature, different, special, the pinnacle of creation? Or about humans being innately flawed, violent, selfish and greedy? How about the one that said that the world was made for human beings to manage, control and exploit as a resource and that the world has no value beyond utility. Or the story about there being only one right way to live and one right way to understand and view the world? Or about how unlimited grow, production, capitalistic greed are all unquestionably good? Or the story that told us that we could have and do anything we want because there are no limits? There were people in the world looking squarely at our stories and the global predicament and seeing what I saw, our culture in its present configuration could not last. I was not alone.
But the transformation, the collapse still seemed far away. It would come one day, but not now. There was time, there was hope. Somewhere there were people taking care of it all. And that’s how it was for me; I lived the average Canadian life. I tried to live the stories I had heard as a child and tried to ignore the rumblings of the future that haunted my depths.
One thing is clear….the global environmental, political and economic situation we live in is critical. The possible scenarios rage into the highly disturbing and the time frame seems, well, imminent.
It is as though we have awakened to find ourselves on a runaway train hurtling wildly down the tracks held in place by powerful cultural stories and fuelled by our desperate consumption, the very heart, bones, blood and flesh of this planet. If we do not find a way to stop this train soon we are going to reach the end of the line.
Part 2 (The Train And The Tracks)
So what do you see when you wake up on the train. I can tell you what I saw. I saw the ground beneath the pavement, the man behind the curtain, the monster under the bed, the reel below the rails. The culture of empire works every moment of every day to distract my attention like a magician using slight of hand. What happens when I look where the conjurer does not want me to look? They see the trick, I see the reality behind the illusion. I see, if I look long enough, that empire has no clothes.
Ride with me a while. Look more closely at the train and the tracks and at the terrains which we are speeding by. If you want to respond
affectively, you will need a clearer picture of the whole situation.
For me, four aspects of our predicaments stand out: peak oil; climate change; mass extinction and population overshoot. I started with peak oil. At first I
didn’t get it so I began talking to people that did understand. What is it? It is when the demand for oil exceeds the amount of oil that can be taken from the ground. Over the last 150 years we have created a society that is heavily dependant on oil. The problem is that oil is a non-renewable resource. Even when the world first started using it, they knew that eventually it would run out.
At 84 million barrels a day, we are now consuming more than that. Newly discovered oil peaked in the 60s and since then we have been discovering less and less new sources. To put it in easier terms….we are using 4 barrels of oil for every 1 that we discover. There are roughly 33 countries that are past their peak oil limit. The first to go was the United States in the 70s. Remember the energy crisis scare of the 70s?! Scientists are estimating that within the next decade or so that the World will hit its peak for oil.
So what exactly will world peak oil mean to the world we know? All our transportation systems, our means of getting food, our global economic model. (capitalism: this due to its ever increasing desire to expand) The root base of all of this is the existence of cheap energy. In order to not go into a recession or depression, we have to have a continual growth in the money supply, which is based of economic growth activity, which is based on the availability of cheap energy and raw resources. We have built an economy that says it must grow every year or face collapse. So the economy will level off and we will see a global economic collapse because of peak oil.
It seems that if we are poised for a meltdown, our agricultural system is doubly so. The oil we EAT can be calculated based on the distance it takes to get to us. So not only is it based on the petroleum to grow it, but also it’s transport and refrigeration. It’s a system that is dependant on cheap energy. In 1940, an average farmer was using approximately a calorie of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food. Today that same farmer uses 10 calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of food. That means that fossil fuels and
petro chemicals have become embedded in our food supply. If we run out of fuel, that strategy will collapse in a heart beat.
Sadly as oil becomes more precious it seems worth fighting for. Prices will rise, people will fight over it. Eventually countries will go to war to make sure that their country gets everything they need to sustain their cultural empire.
Peak oil got my attention. If the ramifications are true about oil then the situation of natural gas is even more desperate. We have had almost 200 years of cheap energy. Is this going to be a historic turning point? Yes it is. It is breathtaking!!!
Even more breathtaking is what happens when we burn fuel. Scientists use to talk about climate change in terms of centuries, now they are talking about decades, now they are talking about next year. Now, they are talking about now.
Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that can get trapped in the atmosphere that help create a heating affect on the planet. it is not the only gass to affect climate change, but in the chain of gases that interact up there, upsetting the levels of one may affect the rest. they just do not know. Imagine the implications. The only good thing about when I began to understand climate change, I spent less time worrying about oil. Some scientist believe we will run out of air to burn before we run out of fossil fuel. In other words, the fossil fuels we burn are helping to create our global warming problem and make the air
unliveable, it won’t really matter how much oil is left.
CO2 has risen from 230 parts per million in the 1800s to 380 parts per million today and by 2050 it is predicted to hit 550 parts per million. So greenhouse gases are on the rise, temperatures are on the rise, more floods, more droughts and rising sea levels. It’s been in the news for some time now. How does this impact the impunity of life? Birds are arriving earlier in the springtime, plants are flowering earlier, species are moving farther north changing the ecosystems around us that we rely on.
There is a very strong biological signal of what climate change is doing to us. Crops and trees will grow in places that they cannot grow today. There is an alarming suspicion that they may not be sustainable there. But there is one particular aspect of this that I find even more fearful and that is that carbon goes into the ocean. It is one of the biggest carbon absorbers we have. It changes the acidity of the oceans, which makes it harder for the plankton to form their soft shells. This may cause a plankton die off which is the bottom of the ocean food chain. Plankton as well a corals are not only threatened by rising acidity but by rising temperatures as well. Phytoplankton levels have declined as much as a 1/3 in some of the northern oceans. This has resulted in significant impacts to fish and bird populations. But the reported dangers go beyond straining the food chains, which is bad enough.
Phytoplanktons produce half of the oxygen we breathe and they are major carbon sink. When they die, they give off CO2, which means more warming. On top of this, new evidence shows that climate can shift very rapidly. Slow changes can build to a tipping point and the system can move abruptly to a new state.
This is happening in the oceans, where a grand current known as the Gulf Stream conveyor belt is being impacted with possibly disastrous results. The amount of carbon dioxide that we are putting out into the atmosphere, most scientists agree, that we may be at a tipping point. Feed back mechanisms that help maintain the planets temperatures will be stretched too far. The classic one is that as the polar caps speed up in melting, the fresh waters affect the warm Gulf Stream and could shut it down. Europe and North America would experience extreme cold and drought. Such an impact would be a huge agaricultural global blow.
Adding to this, the melting of caps change and accelerates the warming. Ice reflects light, which helps to keep the planet regular. If that ice is gone the sun’s radiation/heat will be absorbed by the oceans. The other thing is that there is a lot of carbon stored in the permafrost and if that begins to defrost, the carbon will get oxidized and turn to carbon dioxide creating more greenhouse gas. This is called a ‘snowball effect’ that will become faster as it goes.
So given that we need to lower our greenhouse gases by a reccomended 70 %, given that we live in a culture where economies must grow or die and given that our carbon increase grows along with our economies and given that countries are working feverishly to emulate the North American way of life, it is difficult to see a way to stop it. I have yet to see a realistic proposal or solution to address this. Talk about a snowball’s chance in hell. What if it is out of our control, as I write this, whether we implement the Kyoto agreement or not?
Economic, political, natural and agricultural systems will be wiped out!!! If we speak of inevitability will it overwhelm the masses? Will we slide into apathy and diversion?
Isn’t that where people already are? I don’t think I can afford to look at anything but the truth. Then I have to ask, what are we made of? Who will we be in the face of such truths? If we do not look at these things, generations to come, if there are any, will not be happy with us for refusing to step up and admit our problem and do something about it.
It is not just our human descendants. Millions of species and more are threatened by our behaviour. And for many of them there will be no more generations to come. We are killing off the life forms that give us life. We have black holes in the ocean where no fish exist. Geologists mark geological time by catastrophe. We are in one of those catastrophic extinction periods, but it is human caused. Our changes to our earth caused by us is driving species to extinction 1000 times faster than it should be. Scientists predict that we could lose almost a half of all species within the next century.
It cannot go on. Humans are taking over the planet and everything else is being crowded out,
feld, caught cleaned and canned. The numbers show that the culture of civilization is eating itself out of house and home. On land it is known that we consume 40% of the primary productivity of the planet. We use about 2/5 of the planet’s green to feed us and our livestock and the rest is wood for building and fibres for cloth. I drive through the country and see it. Fields that are parking lots, crops with livestock are now billboards and cell phone towers. We are bulldozing and building our way around the globe. It is the same in the oceans. Many people think that the oceans are vast, but we consume about 1/3 of what is created there. Fish stocks have dropped dramatically. The Grand Banks off the east coast of Canada was shut down to fishing. The cod will soon be a mythical animal like the dodo bird.
What about fresh water? Studies estimate that ½ of the world’s fresh water is used to grow crops or water livestock. Watersheds in the country are so highly developed that any small change in rainfall is causing problems with the availability of drinking water for people.
Multiply that with the amount of fuels, herbicides, pesticides, industrial chemicals, air pollution, with electromagnetic waves, human activity and structures of control and domination, empire is literally poisoning every square inch of the planet. Will the planet survive? I am sure it will, but at the cost and it will only resurface after hundreds of thousands of generations. How can I sum up the extinction rate more clearly? I will use a short story. Say you live in a tall brick building. And everyday we go to the basement and knock bricks out and take it upstairs and put it on the roof to build higher. Every day you take bricks and for a long time the building is stable. But it won’t be stable forever because we are attacking the structural integrity of the building….that is what we are doing to the life of the planet. The system will collapse, just as the build would. If I were in that building I would want to get out, but where would I run? Empire now covers the planet and almost all of us are inside the empire, all 7 billion of us.
One of the hardest things to talk about is the human population explosion. Everyone I talk to about it seems to agree that the earth cannot sustain this number. We are approaching our limit to what the planet can create for us to remain if we grow. I believe that equilibrium will be achieved. Nature can be harsh. We are unlike any other species on the earth. We have such a big brain. We can think, solutionize and prepare, but it does not mean we will. Scientists believe that we exceeded a sustainable population during the 1900s. The population of the earth then was just over 1 billion. So today, we have overshot that number by 6 billion. It is not the numbers but the damage those numbers do to the resources that threatens our existence. The earth supports an even greater number of ants than humans. It can do so because they are smaller and do not waste the resources around them. They don’t build and buy 5000 square foot homes, drive 30 minutes to work or have plasma TV sets or fill landfills with non-recyclable plastics.
The United States leaves 32 times more of a footprint (carbon and resource depletion) than all of India. To speak of overpopulation as the reason for our crisis does not seem correct to me. It conjures images of poor and overpopulated 3rd world countries, while the global impact of rich 1st world lifestyles go unexamined. Big feet, more feet and more and more feet getting bigger. And if these feet keep walking, one of these days they will walk right off the edge. It cannot be sustained.
One thing large populations are especially prone to is disease. Mankind likes to think that he is not ruled by nature, but he is. So what do we do when we finally reach the population peak? Humanity has never encountered this problem before. How do you decrease the surface population humanely? This is BIG and it is not being talked about.
This is what I had to face. That like the tree frog, the tiger and all the other species, I too would have to go.
All great civilizations before me had collapsed and they were by choice. What choices do we now have? What would our success look like? What is inevitable? What remains to be created if we only awake to our power? Most importantly, why have we not already awakened?
Part 3 (The Locomotive Power)
There are other issues I could have looked at like global dimming, honeybee decimation, coal plants, indigenous culture destruction, bioweapons, genetic manipulation or chemtrails. The very survival as a species is now in question. I gaze unflinchingly at the way the world is, the information goes right into my body and I feel shaken to my soul. I feel like running away. I feel, at times, I have been hit head on. I know I am not alone. I wish I had some magic potion or an easy fix. I wish I could tell you that everything was going to be ok. But of course I cannot tell you that and probably deep down, you already know that.
36 years after the first Earth Day. 44 years after Silent Spring, the planet is closer to ecological meltdown that it has ever been. If what we want is to stop the destruction of life on this planet, then what we have been doing is not working. We must not just ask ourselves “what do we do?” we must first ask, “how did we get here?” I don’t think we will have much of chance affecting the radical change that is needed.
Talking about how we feel is exactly what we need to be doing. We must also question assumptions. The one assumption I want to question is that scientists can help us understand the situation, like they are automatically equipped to help us solve it. But there are forces in the world that cannot be understood through a microscope. What are the forces that got us to this point and what are the forces that keep us stuck here? I realized that I would have to step outside the culture so that I could see it through a new perspective. Deep inside the multiple entanglements that threaten our world, there rages a boundless blaze of cultural fire. The locomotive power for the cultural train we are riding. An engine not of steam or diesel, but of story and myth. It is time to have a closer look at the cultural empire.
So how did we get into this mess? Many analysts believe that it began some 20,000+ years ago when man began to engage in an unsustainable style of gathering as food production. A totalitarian agriculture, it all belongs to us. We kill off what we deem not fit to eat. We put a fence around the land. We grow only the food we want on the land and no one else can touch it. The surplus from this new way of getting food had immediate affects fuelling a population growth. We grow food and the population increases. So we are forced to grow more food. It’s a race that cannot be won.
If you look at the early cultures that developed agriculture to sustain its society you will find that through investigation, they are shorter in height, teeth are gone due to carbohydrates eaten, they are misshapen and asymmetrical and they show signs of disease. This new type of agriculture both required and allowed more settlement and with that became the beginnings of wealth and inequity. During the pre-agricultural era, people that lived in communities lived in housing all the same size. During the agricultural era you would see a few large houses with granaries and more small houses connected to it. This kind of social inequity began almost immediately with agriculture. We are taught that agriculture and settlement was the natural way we were suppose to live, so it is shocking to learn that it is the fundamental cause of what has dogged us throughout the centuries. Settlements, which begot villages, which begot cities through totalitarian agriculture and the expansion of inequity and wealth. This allowed a culture to develop into the empire of today. The city turned into a powerful cultural symbol of power. To define what a city is you could say it is a human ecosystem that grossly exceeds its carrying capacity of its local environment. Look at any city in the world and show me one that is self-sustaining. Everything in a city is imported there by what ever means is necessary. Often that means is trade, but trade requires transport and transport requires energy and energy comes from somewhere and it eventually runs out. Trade also requires willing partners and people do not always want to trade. When trade breaks down and you need those resources, what remains is war.
So lets stop for a second and regroup. I told you that I had to challenge some assumptions. We have been doing agriculture, expanding, building cities and accumulating wealth for so long now that it just feels how things are suppose to be. But how can a way of life that is destroying its own support systems be considered how things are supposed to be?
Let’s move on. Once or native natural intelligence was combined with the creative impulses of empire that’s when things began to snowball. Using the power of technology we could break through the limits and laws that once held us. We began to pretend we had no limits, thinking that what we wanted was right. But the belief in the power and control is preceded on faulty assumptions about the limits of science. Science and technology are supposed to be neutral. Only they become a help or hindrance depending on how they are used, but this really isn’t true. The difference between nuclear and solar is more than how we use them. Each technology has built in characteristics that determine how they end up being used and who uses them and for what. Military scientists are not looking to make a solar warhead and I am not looking to put a nuclear powered panel on my roof. Because of this misunderstanding, it is easy to get trapped in the myth of the techno fix.
Half the people in the world live in cities that exceed the carrying capacity of their environments. Every time a new problem arose due to population change, a quick fix was in place to alleviate the problem. This did not solve it and the cycle continued. Our crisis at its deepest levels, it is not a crisis of technology, but of meaning and purpose. We act like all we have to do is throw more technology at it, while we fail to see the clearly cultural issues, that due to fantastic failure, we try to keep the system at present going. We have been pretending for so long, we have forgotten what we once knew. You will not survive for long if you don’t follow the laws of life. As we settled into agriculture and civilization, agriculture and civilization settled into us. We fenced ourselves off from nature and instead thought that it was there to control and manage. Our technologies cut us off from our own experience. Our culture then has forced its way between the world and us and it colours our view of it. We become numb to the outside and isolated. War is a good example of this. To kill someone in front of you may be hard to do. To kill someone from the comfort of 30,00 feet up isn’t. This disconnection from nature has left us confused and wounded. The earth is telling us “you have used me.” We would never tolerate that from another human. At what point do we stop and listen? Will we be able to hear? Has disconnection stopped us from hearing? The planet’s voice barely registers. Our minds are clogged with stories.
Central to my understanding is this: all cultures are based on stories. The culture of empire comes with its own set of unique beliefs and impulses. Stories such as: I am the master of my world, you can’t stop me, we have the technology, you can have anything you want and humans have rights. Living with stories like this, is it any wonder we are devouring the planet. Look at a two year old child and try to explain that ice cream before dinner is not right. We are that two year old. Our culture tells us that this is the best; we are at the human pinnacle since we began to walk upright so any other alternative can’t work. If another culture does not reflect the style in which we live then they are deemed to be not as advanced as we are. Do you need a historical example? Slavery in America, the deconstruction of the Native Americans, the Inquisition or the accent of Rome.
The worst story of them all is the one about how we are superior to all creatures and that we are independent of them.
We need to remember who we are. We can get trapped inside of stories of culture and fantasy that blocks us from our own greatness. Humans can either integrate themselves or be a part of the ecosystem or they can block it all out. It does not have to be this way. Not all cultures have followed the empire. Inherent human characteristics have always been mediated by the larger society. We carry the traits of our ancestors with us. We look around us to see how things affect us at that moment. The long-term issues are not really relevant or comprehensible to most. This is why most don’t see climate change or oil depletion. There are other forces that play out over the long term that we can’t see like exponential growth and population dynamics. Nobody intended to overpopulate the world, nobody intended to pollute the ocean or put holes in the ozone. It is individual actions accepted by the whole.
Culture tells us that we can live apart from nature and its laws without limits, without rules, but doing so has left us and the planet battered and beaten. It isn’t working out the way we were taught it would. So why do we continue this way? The first thing to note is that all these historical forces are still all in play. It is sobering and sad to think that we are trapped in an economy that must grow or die. We are corporately controlled my media that tells us what to think.
“Rational people will go quietly and meekly into a gas chamber if you only allow them to believe that it is a bathroom.” Zigmund Bowmont.
And I have lost all hope that my government is capable of looking clearly at the situation. And sadly, our educational systems leave us totally unprepared to question the dominant culture. I was never encouraged to question how or why our culture creates disconnection. If you live in a world where your food comes from a grocery store and your water from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it. If your experience is that your water comes from a stream and your food from a land base then you will defend that stream and land base to the death because your life depends on it.
Systems of manipulation and exploitation, structure of disconnections and delusion, institutions of domination and deceit, I had to ask, who would create such things? Only people who had become totally disconnected from the world, people who had forgotten who they once were. Almost everything that we see, hear, taste, touch and smell is mediated by humans and machines. It gives us an inflated sense of our own importance and warps true reality.
Our animal bodies want and require a real relationship to the earth, to the water wind and soil, to the animals, plants and fellow humans that comprise the community in which we were born. But we have become stuck in the hall of mirrors and we begin to lose our sanity. We become fragmented in our isolation…schizophrenia, multiple personalities, and depression. You then begin to see the illusion of self-importance is key. Through that invincibility the empire was born. The feeling or belief in nature becomes unimportant and becomes something to be conquered rather than coexist with.
I stop, I listen. The disconnection of the world is everywhere. On the bus I see children with ear buds in their ears listening to music to shut out the world around them so as not to deal with it. The window displays in stores and television ads shows and encourages this disconnection, keeping us away from what we need, keeping us chained to empire.
Over the years I have begun to break away from the culture and reconnect myself to the living earth. I still have a ways to go. It has not been easy, but it is still one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.
I have also learned to view this culture through the lens of addiction. The addiction is continually seeking more of what we don’t really want and therefore never being fully satisfied. All that is left really is to hit bottom. The choice will be either shift or die. That is why we are in no hurry to change or course in life. If hitting bottom is what is needed, then surely it will come to pass in a harsh way. Again I stop and listen as I move through the landscape of empire. Denial is so thick you could cut it with a paper knife. Denial takes tremendous energy and if you have to work hard to not acknowledge that this culture is killing everything, then you won’t have much left over. It is the energy that I freed up when I stepped away that has made this essay possible. The more I let down my defences, the more I have the power to look deeply at the world. And when I look I see the story of ‘somehow’, a fantasy that keeps us passive in face of the world situation. Somehow is not real. It is a fictitious belief of a way to get from here to there. As world events break through our walls of denial, voices of helplessness and resignation fill the air. This system feels like a madhouse. With resignation, the only thing to do is try to make the madhouse as comfortable as possible.
We have looked now at the train that is hurtling us to destruction, at the tracks that constrain us and the locomotive power that drives us there. And we see more clearly now where we are headed and it all adds up to this. This culture is not only killing the planet, it is destroying us as human beings. A powerful creative tension arises when we hold two things at the same time, a clear assessment of where we are and a clear vision of where we want to go. I don’t see that the culture of empire has either. Trapped in a fantasy of domination and control, any clear assessment will be trampled under foot. And the mad march towards the scam of progress, traumatized by disconnection and abuse, the people of empire hold visions that are unhinged and insane. Born and raised in captivity, we are now so institutionalized that few of us can even see the prison bars. But we all know our cell numbers. Waking on the train, we find that we don’t know where we are and we don’t know where we are going. We can hear the whistle blowing and we can see the world go speeding by. Some of us want to stop the train; we want to get off before it reaches the end of the line. But we have no clear idea how to get from here to there.
Part 4 (Walkabout)
The secret plan is that we are going to go on this way as long as we can. It like in Nazi Germany, everyone knew that the Jews were not going off to secret picnics in the woods, but no one talked about it. And no one talks about this either. As civilization has provided more and more for us, it has left us more and more infantile so that we are less and less able to think for ourselves, less and less able to provide for ourselves and pushed us into more of a herd mentality. We take our cues from the people around us.
The situation is desperate. It’s a world wide eco slam where climate, extinction and oil fight it out. It’s clear that the empire life is unsustainable…. simply it means it can not be maintained. 30 years ago we looked at the future and said if we don’t act, 30 years from now we are going to be in trouble. Well its now and we are because we didn’t. The fundamental laws of life have been broken and the consequences are apparent. Remember the secret plan, the dominant culture is not going to stop until it destroys itself. It is built on a foundation of faulty assumptions. I can see no way that it can be reformed. It can only be discarded so that something new can grow in its place. We have to look at this.
Before there was science, humans knew how to relate to the universe. Then came science and they said, no no, I will show you how to run the universe. People have to understand that we are part of the living community. Not the masters or the guardians of it. We are just another of it’s species with the power to destroy the community.
I have read many books about the world’s current situation and I have noticed one thing, The Happy Chapter. After an entire book of dire prognostications and dark facts, comes the chapter that says ‘if we only do this, this and that, we will find the solution.’ Even though there is so much to give us concern, there is something to give us hope. I don’t like happy chapters, they lull me back to the sleep. They suggest somewhere, some how someone is handling it. I can just go on with my life and hey, we got 30 years or so right? That’s lots of time. I am sorry folks, but I think time is up. I have no happy chapter to offer you, no list of quick and painless fixes. No plan to keep this train rolling on this track, I see no way for that to happen. If there is going to be a happy chapter, we shall have to write it together with the rest of the community of life on the pages of the living world. Maybe the future generations will look back and ask, “what happened to those people? How did they lose sight of such basic things?”
There is a new story in the world. The story of the Great Turning. The turning away from the old culture of domination and the turning to a culture that is life sustaining and life renewing. All over the planet people are telling this story. Will we be the monsters of our great-grandchildren’s nightmares or will we walk, as the Great Turning says, as heroes and healers of those still unborn voices? Will we be reviled for our destructive ways or will we be lovingly remembered in the songs of our descendants as they recount the stories of this lost and very wounded tribe that stepped back from the abyss and walked back to the community of souls. We get to choose, who are we going to be?
Look! Is this who we are, consumers, shoppers, workers? Does our identity lie in Nelson ratings, SUVs and box office receipts? Are we on this earth to sell cheeseburgers to each other and yell at our children, drive around in clown cars and fall asleep in front of the tube? Are we destroying the planet just to be somewhat comfortable for a little while? I keep having to remind myself this culture is not humanity. It is only one out of the tens of thousands that use to exist on this planet. That this culture has overrun the world means nothing about its rightness or its destiny. It means we only live in system of social evolution that strives for short-term power rather than compassion or for sanity or for long-term survival. I think that we are much more than we have ever been allowed to believe. Denied the connection and meaning that nourishes us, we’ve grown stunted in the shallow soil of this culture. It is time to revitalize that ground of our well being. As the whole culture collapses, we will have an opportunity to come back to what we should be.
We are in a time of initiation folks, a mass initiation of our culture. A vision quest of the collective mind. This cultures current ideas of adolescence must be sloughed off and take up the responsibility of the interdependence and nourishment of the community of life. This is the purpose of initiation. Stepping into this new culture of maturity and taking our rightful place in the community of life. And we will fall back in love with the world. We can do this only if we choose to. Only if we lay down our weapons of this insane war against the world, only if we surrender control and move back into relationship.
You want unlimited growth? You can have it, all you’ve ever asked for and more. Growth and relationship and experience, in self-awareness and spirit and love, in community and connection. Growth and purpose and meaning grows with vision when we step back into the community of life. We will find out immediately what has been true, that all of life is on our side. We’ll have polar bears on our team and condors and tigers and salmon. We will walk with the wind and the water and mountains under foot, stars overhead. The tigers blood will course through our veins, the horse’s breath will fill our lungs. We will be more connected to real power than we ever dreamt possible. Power with, not power over. The power of a species that has passed through initiation and into maturity.
Our descendants are watching us. How will we be? Its time to be thoughtful and come together to learn about the world as it really is, reading between the lies, doing the math, studying the world situation. There will be a quiz. A paradigm shift is required to question our deepest assumptions and hold our old culture carefully in our arms and with care wait until it breathes its last. Step into a new story, walk away from the pyramids, step out of the crumbling building. Choose your favourite metaphor, choose your own adventure. But choose, its time to be truthful. Billions of sensual pulsing animal bodies that are trapped and used and starved in cities and shopping malls and traffic. What would happen if we let ourselves feel about all this? The entire community of life is counting on us. Where do we take a stand? When do we find the courage to let ourselves feel what is going on? Our feelings are the swiftest path back to our forgotten selves. It is time to be open and humble. There are huge forces at work in the world seen and unseen. Its time to ask for help. Ask your ancestors, ask the gods, ask your god, go outside and lie on the ground and ask the earth and the sky and then listen for a response. Listen to the voices of soil and stone, wind and water, the voices of trees and the birds. The world will tell us what it knows if only we be still and listen. And then speak. Its time to show up in our own lives and tell the truth. Its time to talk about the world situation, we are all in this together. What a relief it will be to discover that we are not alone anymore. Its time to act with great intention. There is plenty of work to do. Save trees and stop bulldozers and stand up at city council meetings and say your truth. Join a community and move from agriculture to perm culture and grow your own foods. Learn about medicinal herbs. Find your work and do it.
But what about that speeding train? How will the Great Turning turn? We can wait for that train to crash on its own taking us and the world with it. Or we can come together and dismantle the tracks of a culture that no longer serves us. This may seem like an impossible task, but if the alternative is extinction, then we have nothing to lose. We humans once knew how to live on this planet, some still do and that’s the good news. It can be done. We can do way way better than empire.
Let’s jump off the train and build a boat. The train and its tracks are too rigid and almost makes it impossible to steer. The boat, ah the boat is a very different thing. Boats set sail into the unknown, subject only to the wind and the wave and the weather. Boats can be lifeboats preserving wisdom and understanding. Boats can be arks saving the world as the floodwaters rise. And boats can be adventure, carrying us away from the shores of the current paradigm and to a future of those unseen shores of a future not yet written. Find your people and build a boat, find your community and preserve the life of a piece of land. Or set sail on a wider journey to disrupt the destruction, healing the wounds, grafting connections and changing minds. Build it now, the ice is melting, the water is rising. We will have to let go of the shore. I do not know if I will survive the crash of the industrial civilization or the effects of climate change this culture has unleashed. I do know this, I have a choice about how I will meet it. I have a choice, we have a choice. I can meet it with a burger in my hand, fries in my mouth and a cold coke spilling on my jeans or I can meet it with consciousness, integrity and a sense of purpose that is my birthright. This is my course, this is my choice, this is where I will stand. I will show up and tell my truth. It is hard to stand alone in heavy waves, but if you sail with me our crew will be made strong indeed. Together we can go forward together and find that new land. What A Way To Go.
