A difficult time…

Ours is the most sophisticated of times…and the crassest. Ninety-nine percent of the world knows, with scientific certainty or through lived experience, that our environment will cease to support us in less than a couple of lifetimes; the other one percent seems unable to care.

The fantasy of money is everyone’s reality. We spend some of our wealth sending robotic vehicles out to explore space and nearby planets, asteroids, and stars (https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/13441/nasa-s-osiris-rex-probe-arrives-safely-asteroid-bennu), but most of our resources go to spectacles (movies, tv, social media, etc.) or to shopping, both created for entertainment, distraction, and self-aggrandizement.

Millions of us live with more comfort, physical safety, and personal freedom than any other humans in history; billions of us suffer with war, famine, disease, exploitation, and forced displacement on a scale also never before experienced.

The continents blend one into another as species (plants, insects, microbes, etc.) spill over their natural boundaries and are carried by our boats and planes around the world to colonize other species’ territories destroying the evolutionary connection between species and their native environment.

Technicians send messages through outer space while, on Earth, they fill each of our personal space with a miasma of image, talk, and noise.  Megalomaniacs and sociopathic narcissists take center stage; we are hypnotized by their ignorance and stupidity, and yet unable to turn our backs on them.

Speed, information, and artificial desire warp our lives and disrupt our serenity. We tremble in our anxiety and lie sleepless in our beds. We are at a loss as to what to do to cure the misery of our disequilibrium and alienation or heal the Earth.

Only Nature seems to offer an antidote to our dysfunction, but the faster we run toward her, the quicker she seems to diminish, disappearing almost completely out of our sight.

An adequate response?

We are awash in advice about how to live at this most strange and frightening moment in history. Most of the advice (mine included!) is well meant: work for an environmentally responsible government, drive an electric car or use public transportation, eat locally produced foods or grow your own, minimize the amount of meat you eat, recycle, reuse, repair, divest fossil fuel stocks, and the list goes on. (See Le Pacte: https://www.lepacte.ca/english.html for a recent example of what passes for convenient environmental action  in a “clicktivism”* format.)

But nowhere is it suggested that the economic (and therefore cultural) system within which we are embedded is to blame for the coming ecological disaster! Nowhere is it demanded that we take a hit to our incomes or our standard of living, even though that standard is way out of proportion to the way the rest of the world lives, and to how we would need to live to save the planet!

The change to a sustainable lifestyle will not be cosmetic: it will be essential and disruptive. The irony is that whether we choose to or are even capable of living simply, in tandem with Nature now, we or our progeny will be forced to live that way in the near future.

So how do we move forward, take the best action, act responsibly and ethically in the dilemma facing all of us? I have been thinking that perhaps it would be good to step back, and think about what each of us needs as emotional support in order to resist the toxic demands of our society, and make the truly profound changes in our personal lives that this moment calls for.

I have some ideas, but I would like to hear what you think! What helps you take the necessary steps, and keep making the difficult choices, to help our dire situation?

*”clicktivism” is described in Micah White’s book, The End of Protest, page 217, as “a false theory of social change that encourages complacency by feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact.”