The Refined Art of Calling Things as They Are

"Why don't we fight harder?" The question burns in me, sometimes gently and other times like a southern California fire in July pushed by the Santa Ana winds. I think of it as I sit here and watch the cars roll by, as I glide past the smokestack at the Stanford co-gen plant in the evening, and as I picture an iceberg the size of Luxembourg breaking off an Antarctic glacier. I think of it as we plan weddings and funerals, make deposits into our 401K plans, or talk of property values and long-term investments. I think of it as we pursue our individual passions, advance our entertainment technology, and struggle through this Great Recession without an end in sight.

The question came to me from a Derrick Jensen article that I can't even find right now. But that particular article is not terribly important. He, and some courageous others, have been writing for years about our losing struggle as humans to save ourselves and the biosphere from our heavy hand of destruction. He is of the opinion, which I share, that we're not doing nearly enough to stop the catastrophic changes we're wreaking on the planet. In one of his articles in Orion Magazine about getting beyond hope (http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/), he says:

PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good.

I'm glad he wrote that. I share his sentiment. When I look around, I see little evidence in our culture at large that we are going to stop being destructive to ourselves and the world around us. Yet I delight in good times, love the people close to me, and am trying to enjoy each day as much as I can. In fact, this is my purpose in life - to walk my journey as best I can and work for common good, while keeping in my heart the knowledge that we are not doing enough.

I can't prove it to someone who wants to argue about whether or not we're deep into an ongoing catastrophe that we can't seem to slow down. I think of resource wars, overpopulation, extinction, climate change, alienation from each other, and other big picture trends as evidence that our impact is too big and too complex for us to remedy in any significant way. I see no real, logical reason for optimism in any other trends, either - 'green' technology, buying things with a slightly smaller ecological footprint, conferences on the idea of sustainability, healthcare reform legislation, carbon offsets, etc. However, I don't want to live in despair because the tide of destruction is overwhelming. I believe that the reason we are unable to really change course as a culture/species is the same reason that I am able to live with something other than perpetual despair.

There is an analogy circulating widely, mainly amongst liberal folks who read science news I think, that we are in a condition similar to a frog in a pot. As you turn up the heat on the frog, in small increments, it does not notice that its habitat is quickly becoming hazardous to its health. Apparently, you can come close to boiling the frog without it freaking out. Our situation as humans is postulated to be analogous - we are poor at perceiving threats due to slowly changing circumstances. As the air gets more toxic in big cities over decades, we fail to notice the changes because we continue to acclimate ourselves in mind and body to the conditions as they evolve. We fail to look at a planet with 7 billion people on it and freak out about overpopulation and crowding because it has been (relatively) slowly growing over many decades. If the population doubled or the air became cloudy with soot within the course of one year, we might notice with alarm that our environment suddenly became less hospitable. Such a drastic change might overwhelm our senses and thinking enough to capture a large part of our attention, and perhaps subsequently our action.

Instead, we focus on the bits of our daily life in front of us. We pay bills, go to work, adapt as best we can to new technologies, medicate ourselves with entertainment and drugs, spend a lot of energy finding and thinking about a life partner, gather or grow our food, and on and on. These activities take up our attention and energy, and we only have so much life left to devote to pondering our place in the big picture, what the big picture even is, and how we may contribute to the future of this big picture. I believe that we can only focus on the big picture, which for me at this point in time is on a scale smaller than astronomy and bigger than your local town, for a certain amount of time each day, week, month, and year. To sit with the idea of global ecological collapse, day in and day out, is overwhelming. Such a practice might lead me, or anyone else, to kill myself. I believe we are simply not organized in our heads to be able to give constant attention to such a broad, sometimes subtle, multi-faceted, ever-evolving threat to the basis of our lives.

We give so much thought and action to the little things that make up our daily lives, that to me it seems that we are fundamentally unable to take the individual and collective action required to steer our planet on a drastically different course. It will take going beyond politics, economics, religion, habit, and all the other impediments to a thoughtful and scientific look at ourselves and the world around us. We will need to immediately cease so much of what we have built our modern standard of living around - massive throughputs of energy and materials, neither of which we are allowing to regenerate at anything close to the rate that we are extracting them. We will need to voluntarily reduce our population by some amount in the billions, at the very least. We will need to leave the trees in and oceans in peace, to let them recover as best they can. We need to stop putting plastics and other novel chemicals out in the world to wreak havoc on us and the biosphere. We need wholesale change on every level.

What does all this have to do with me not wanting to live in despair? Everything! I want to admit all these terrifying things about the trends I see in the world around me, and continue to feel like I'm doing a bit to live lightly on the earth. I want to write and talk about futures that I feel good about. I want to have love, intimacy, fun, exercise, sleep, meaningful work, and good food. I feel that by disclosing my fear and resignation that we are destined for some kind of collapse, we can still feel good each day by taking care of ourselves and aiming to have a milder outcome as we emerge from this crisis. I want to protect wildlife - not because I think humans are really going to voluntarily give back habitat and resources to them and they'll return to a "natural" state, but rather to keep diversity alive beyond this period of destruction if possible. I want to free the political prisoners in Burma - not necessarily because it is the most important thing in the world, but because I carry a little pain in my gut thinking of them spending their lives in prison. I like public transit, but it's not going to make New York/Tokyo/Bangkok/Cairo/Paris/Portland an ecologically sound place. I want to tackle these problems, while admitting that I don't think we will be able to "save ourselves" (i.e. preserve something resembling our way of life and level of affluence) through any action we can muster at any level.

I'm writing all this to get back on track with my purpose. I want to come clean like I'm at an AA meeting. I want to share that I think we're completely screwed, but we can delight in the joy that life brings and in doing things that we feel good about. My purpose is still, as always, to sink my teeth into good things and put one foot in front of the other. I want to write useful essays. I want to help carry my friends through their hard times. I want us to disabuse ourselves of illusions. I want to dig in the dirt a bit and build with my hands. I want to try my best to live and die with integrity. I want to go beyond rhetoric of self-congratulation and self-flagellation. I want to cut out the frivolous (not the same as fun). I want to be more radical all the time.

I'm looking for partners. Leave a comment, help me out, send me a vibe. I'm doing my best.