The emergency is in us, and in our stories

The problems we face as a result of our impact, as a species, on other systems, have emerged out of deeply rooted ideas we have of our relationship to the rest of existence. One story we tell ourselves is that the space we occupy as a species is so minimal that the planet itself is virtually unaffected.

Thus we have images like this:

Every human in the world would fit in a pile into the Grand Canyon. So what’s the problem?

It is harder and harder to make the argument that we have little significant collective impact on the planet. The thin layer of microplastics, chemical particles from industry, radioactive material and other results of human activity are now laid down over the entire surface of the planet, pole to pole. We even have our own geological age: the Anthropocene. To argue that we are insignificant in impact is to ignore the evidence that is everywhere we look. We have affected every other system, from ocean floor to mountain top, on every continent, without exception.

When I say “we”, though, I have to be careful. Amazonian tribes have lived in relative stability within the limits of the ecosystems they coexist with for millennia. Therefore I must mean something particular about the human species and that needs to be delineated. The industrial, agricultural, exploitative cultures that demand conquest, domination, and exponential growth which is the very definition of profit are the aspects of human impact that we are seeing the results of now. Those of us who grew up as part of these cultures, immersed in their inevitability, are the ones now waking up to their brutal effects. This is the “we” of which I speak.

This culture is highly resistant to waking up, however. In Kubler-Ross speak, we are in denial. We argue that there are beneficial effects to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. It will allow for more plant growth. This ignores the complexity and fragility of biodiverse systems for which the manipulation of a single factor, like CO2 increase, vastly oversimplifies the response of interactions between species, soil, water, and countless other factors. Again, this illustrates how difficult this culture finds it to comprehend the nature of the mesh within which our own complex systems emerge. We depend so utterly on a functioning interaction between non-human systems, at the micro- and at the macro-level, from cell health to climate stability, that the lack of interest in systems thinking in schools and universities leaves us staggeringly incapable of sufficient depth of research when it comes to considering the issues.

We are also angry. The polarising effects of political beliefs, and strong clinging to ideologies, from communism to libertarianism, make it hard for some of us to talk to others. Yet we are intimately interwoven into the evolutionary history of the planet. It is us. We are it. However much it might be hoped that humans came to Earth from elsewhere, or that our species alone (or some subgroup of it) is divinely chosen, the evidence for evolution as the way we got here is overwhelming.

Despair and depression is the next stage, quickly followed by fear. If we wake up to our enmeshment, we also realise that there is very little any one of us can do. This is like waking up to being in a juggernaut, heading for a cliff, unable to turn the wheel or jump out of the cab. A kind of nihilism emerges at this point. Since there is nothing we can do, we might as well, party. Violence is another option that emerges for nihilists. We might as well fight. We’re an aggressive species in any event, so full throated battle is a default mode. We’ll grab a gun and go ballistic. It relieves the boredom and it feels like power.

Of course, the final stage is the one where the work begins, so it behoves us well to get there as quickly as we can. The final stage is acceptance. This is radical because it requires we turn inward. We look at ourselves and we accept everything that has brought us to this point. I’m partly talking personally here. It needs to happen for each one of us, including me. It is the hardest thing, but also the most liberating. When we accept that the emergence is not so much what is emerging out there, but what is emerging in here, we can begin to see the possibilities for compassionate action.

It will take more than education to wean us from the consumption that is eating away at our interconnected external world. Education, however, is a good place to start. Get wisdom, above all. Get understanding. But learning the skill of self acceptance, not so we slump into depression, or jump into a rage, but so we are completely alive to who and what we are, is the beginning of a tsunami of change. Acceptance is the skill that allows discipline to arise. Discipline is really just another word for skill. Acceptance is the mindful awareness of all our pain, addiction, denial and avoidance which allows us to release ourselves from shame, and so become vulnerable, and able to engage whole heartedly with others in the human and in the more-than-human world. From here, we learn that restraint has other, subtler rewards than indulgence. That although we are less satiated, we are more satisfied with limiting our needs. We can come to this place and know it for the first time. We can be at home in the world, and in ourselves, and we can work for the benefit of the systems that created and sustain us, seeing the “we” expand at last to all.