As reality becomes harder to deny, I'm hearing an increasing number of cries,
growing in intensity and tinged with urgency welling up from the grassroots regarding
Peak Oil, catastrophic climate destabilization, biospheric toxicity, rapidly dwindling
quality of life, increasing wealth gap in the Global North, and increasing poverty in the
Global South: "What can we do?" However, all the proposed solutions from the
mainstream simply involve putting band-aids on the symptoms of industrialism and
empire.
For example, the "solution" to what is probably the world's number one industrial
disease, cancer, is to call on industrial medicine to create more industrial chemicals
that are marketed as drugs to mask the symptoms of the underlying cause -- instead
of doing anything to stop the underlying cause. Of course this is how a dominator
paradigm, which is the dominant paradigm in Western industrial civilization, wants
things to be. If they can keep people focused on, or distracted from, the symptoms,
they don't have to worry about them demanding change to the underlying cause.
As Thomas Pynchon wrote, "If they can get you asking the wrong question,
they don't have to worry about the answers."
Exacerbating today's myriad problems is that many environmentalists find
themselves being tuned out by the mainstream because they insist that the path to a
sustainable future necessarily entails suffering, sacrifice, and austerity. However, this
is not necessarily the case. Becoming truly sustainable needn't be a Neo-Luddite call
to return to the cave and put on hair-shirts.
Some change-makers also say that people must be given the time and support to
grieve for a lost lifestyle. Up to a certain point, this is true. But how much grieving
must be done over a lifestyle that is killing the planet and all species on it? Over a
lifestyle that causes Americans to rank themselves 149 out of 150 countries on the
happiness scale? Wouldn't it be much healthier to be celebrating its passing? My
thinking is that what we must do is offer hospice to the story of industrialism, profit,
and growth, and compassionately hold it in our arms as it draws its last, dying breath.
While offering support to the grieving, however, we must do two vital things. The first
is to remain aware of what's wrong, on that which doesn't work to support life, and on
how things got this way. We must do so to ensure that no aspect of the life-
destroying story retains a foothold that can metastasize back through culture again.
We must remain aware of how force-based ranking hierarchies of domination take
root and function, and be ever vigilant that they don't have even a miniscule role to
play as we rediscover how to be human on a living planet. The second is to start
making decisions that incorporate the way life on the planet has remained
sustainable for billions of years.
What we're facing, especially for Western civilization, is more than just an energy
crisis. It's a resource crisis, it's a toxicity crisis, it's a financial crisis. Perhaps most
importantly, though, if we're to effectively do anything about any of this, is becoming
aware that -- especially for the people who consider themselves part of Western
civilization -- it's an identity crisis.
When we take a long, hard look at the plethora of "symptoms" and begin to discern
their common underlying cause, it becomes clear that if we continue in our current
direction, we'll end up where we're headed -- toward total collapse, chaos, and
massive suffering. Business as usual will most certainly destroy what we call
civilization (although more people are coming to see this as a good thing), and
perhaps even the natural world -- which will recover, but on a time-scale measured
on the tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
Doesn't it seem that the rational thing to do is change direction? Fortunately, this
entails little more than making different choices based on a set of values that support
life. We could easily start this aspect of the process by adopting the values set forth
in the Earth Charter, an international people's declaration of interdependence. These
values are: respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, social and
economic justice, and democracy, nonviolence and peace.
So, how do we actually do this? What is the on-the-ground process? How do we
change our identity -- not who we really are when free of propaganda and
manipulation, but how we see ourselves and the manner in which we form and
maintain our relationships with each other and the natural world?
Industrialism depends on a paradigm of force-based ranking hierarchies of control
that rule through fear; it is a system of power-over maintained by a small number
who consider themselves elite. The rest of us support this by agreeing that they are
indeed elite; that the concept of "divine right of kings" is an immutable aspect of the
natural order.
Fortunately, there is a viable alternative. The field of ecopsychology and the process
of relocalization can provide the basis of a systemic alternative to the domination and
exploitation of the "other" that industrialism requires for its survival.
Relocalization -- as the process to create a sustainable future -- is part of a viable
response to the dwindling supplies of cheap and abundant fossil fuels that power the
Industrial Growth Society, as well as a response to the climate-altering
consequences of burning fossil fuels, razing the forests, and killing the oceans in
order to keep a human population that's well beyond carrying capacity heavily
addicted to consumption. Relocalization covers the steps to start rebuilding the
community relationships that have been destroyed by the mindset of rugged
individualism in a culture that inculcates isolation, alienation, and a sense of an
inferior other. It seeks to replace our dependency on never-ending economic growth
and centralized control with the self-reliance of steady-state local economies that are
both vibrant and resilient.
There are some wonderful local examples of the process of looking to life beyond oil
beginning to take hold. There is also an international movement, Transition
Initiatives, whose rapid growth received a major boost from the recent infusion of
resources from the Post Carbon Institute's Relocalization Network into Transition US.
Embracing the philosophy of bioregionalism and the ethics of permaculture design
will be an integral aspect of the overall process of building a sustainable alternative
instead of attempting to reform the dominant system -- which is ultimately doomed to
failure as it's based on faulty assumptions.
Creating a sustainable future, however, is about a bit more than finding renewable
energy alternatives for transportation, electricity, and heating. It includes replacing
the pharmaceutical model of health care. It's about doing away with industrial and
financial growth as a foundation for the economy. It's about creating alternatives to
toxic industrial food and education. It's about overturning the "right to pollute,"
imperialism, and total war. It's about saying no, forcefully and forthrightly when
necessary, to the paradigm that is anathema to life.
But the path into a sustainable future must begin with a first step, and intelligently
preparing for Peak Oil actually begins to address, due to the interconnected nature of
reality, all of the global crises bearing down on us. The same, of course, can be said
about using catastrophic climate destabilization as the focus for the necessary
change.
Ultimately, however, creating a sustainable future is really about our separation from
the natural world, and a major sign of insanity is a loss of connection with the real
world. The real root cause of all that ails us is that our cultural stories -- words we
semi-arbitrarily throw together -- are taken to be more real than nature itself. The
economic dictum of infinite growth is a perfect example.
This disconnection is seen as the true root cause of our personal, social, and
environmental ills by many of today's leading thinkers in both the life and physical
sciences. It's somewhat embarrassing to have to point out that this thinking just
happens to agree with what indigenous wisdom from around the world has been
telling us for centuries. But, this is just another sign of our disconnection.
Reconnecting with nature would then seem to be a necessary aspect of any
rational response to our myriad global and personal crises. The premise of applied
ecopsychology is that this can be done by facilitating people's remembrance and
experience of their connection to the web of life; the unity of being; the foundation of
love, belonging, fulfillment, creation, and joy that humans are an intimate aspect of.
At a certain level, reconnecting with nature is the necessary first step to systemic --
or sustainable -- change because people won't fight to save what they don't love.
Fortunately, "reconnecting" actually turns out to be fairly easy for anyone open to
experiencing our connection within the web of life. Applied ecopsychology has an
easy to learn and easy to teach process developed by Dr. Michael Cohen known as
the Natural Systems Thinking Process. This process works to rationally, sensuously
and spiritually reconnect all 53 of our naturally evolved senses to their roots in the
natural world. It is both a powerful and fulfilling way to experience what is sometimes
called absolute unity being -- the state religious mystics spend their entire lives
searching for.
Reconnecting and relocalizing. This combination is a viable, realistic, and systemic
response to global crises that can improve quality of life in a manner that is actually
more in keeping with human nature in a creative, life-affirming universe.
It's time to get busy, and accept our responsibility and ability to make different
choices. It's time to be free of a paradigm that is destroying our planet. It's time to
reclaim our natural inheritance.
Dave Ewoldt is Executive Director of Natural Systems Solutions, a non-profit which
uses natural systems principles to facilitate the creation of sustainable lifestyles,
organizations, and communities. He's developed a sustainability project which can
help communities make the necessary policy changes to withstand the growth lobby,
power-down, and improve quality of life through adherence to natural systems
principles.
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