Plant a tree. Plant a bunch of trees. We’re going to need some forests, folks. With people like Sarah Palin now openly admitting to the reality of global warming, isn’t it about time that some action is taken? And we must do more than “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” We must do all three of those things, and we must actively work to regenerate our diverse ecosystems.
No one asked me, but I would say that a sensible use of over $700 billion, a sensible use for the billions of dollars that are daily pouring into our military and war efforts, would be to revitalize domestic service programs like AmeriCorps as well as create new programs modeled after the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal era.
America and the world are in the midst of a transition from a paradigm of consumption and so-called progress to one of attempting to achieve homeostasis. The greenhouse effect is being exacerbated by our continued depletion and increased burning of fossil fuels; beyond that, we may have very well have entered into an unprecedented era of geothermal feedback: recently, scientists in the Arctic observed bubbles of methane–which had been previously trapped under glacial ice and permafrost, now melting–burgeoning out of the ocean. Methane causes global warming twenty times more intensely than carbon dioxide. With the continued worldwide reliance on fossil fuels for transportation and economic activity, this geological compounding of the problem of global warming seems like a very, very bad phenomenon, at least for life as we are accustomed to it.
In his book The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler states: “Of the earth’s estimated 10 million species, 300,000 have vanished in the past fifty years. Each year, 3,000 to 30,000 species become extinct… .” He projects, “Within one hundred years, between one-third and two-thirds of all birds, animals, plants, and other species will be lost.” In case you are disinclined to care, let me take this opportunity to remind the cynical and hard-hearted that we humans are mammals, are animals. We are one species in the estimated 10 million. Within the next hundred years, humans could be extinct.
It is time for us to wake up to reality. Not only is the environmental crisis severe, but even as we continue to trace the patterns of the dying industrial economy with the driving of our daily lives, the entire economic structure we have become accustomed to and taken for granted is crumbling. Keener eyes than Paulson’s and our politicians have seen this coming. As of now, both the legislative and executive branches of the federal government of the United States of America are denying the severity of the economic collapse. And they are denying their denial as they incredibly continue this cycle of financial waste, bloating the pockets of the elite and super-rich with what will ultimately become valueless paper and minerals, while feeding calming sound bytes and junk bonds to the populace.
In his book Entropy, first published in 1980 and then re-issued in an updated second edition in 1989, Jeremy Rifkin described the transition from our current industrialized, high-energy consumption society towards a society of low-energy consumption, using renewable resources, intermediate technology, and human work and energy. Some sensible recommendations were made, yet in 2008, nearly a full 20 years after the revised edition of this book became available to the public and those in power, our situation is much the same—no, it’s not; it is of course worse. There is a litany of social and environmental problems. Volumes of reports and books have been written describing them and offering alternatives, attempting workable solutions. Hardly anything is being done. Perhaps more of us reduce, reuse, and recycle now than we did in 1980 or 1988 or whenever, but we need much more active solutions.
The analysis has been made, the studies have been done, the books have been written, the speeches and pleas made. It is now time for us to act. The rugged individualism and cowboy mentality of frontier America is, at this point, suicidal. We must immediately begin to organize at every level of society to mitigate the damage we have done and are doing to our home, the Earth. It is time that we actively address the inherent connection between economics and ecology. Both words obviously share the same root, eco-; they are not incompatible, although we have been treating them as separate and opposed at least since Descartes and Francis Bacon. I don’t need to make the connection for you. Everyone has access to a dictionary and should be able to process the connection between economics and ecology, between economics and ecosystem; but let me go ahead and make it clear: economics, in its original definition before being corrupted and perverted by the notion that the world is inexhaustible and that everything in nature can be exploited and pushed around as or by machines, means the care of one’s home. It cannot be denied that, no matter where we live, the Earth is our ultimate home. Without the functioning ecosystems of the Earth, without clean air, drinkable water, and abundant food, we will die. We could become extinct.
If we don’t go the way of the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the great auk, etcetera ad nauseam, there may be much fewer left of us in one hundred years, even given our best efforts at mitigation and remediation of our environmental crisis. The global population of humans has bloomed in the industrial age. Like other species, this bloom will likely be followed by a die-off; in any case we must actively curb and diminish our population. Now I am not making a case for war, euthanasia, or any kind of murder. What I would like to suggest is that we stop having as many children, and taking good care of and educating and nurturing the ones that we have already, no matter who their biological parents are. And we should stop bickering about abortions; abortions have been practiced by cultures throughout all times and places on Earth, and there is nothing wrong with them, in my opinion. Better to abort a fetus than to bear an unsupportable, possibly unwanted, child into a dying world. If a couple wants or needs to have an abortion, that is their right, and they are in many ways doing us all a favor; they are doing the planet and future generations of all species a favor, as ironic as that may be.
I’ve heard several people lately say that America is coming apart at the seams. If it is, we need to recognize that for what it is: a breaking down of old social orders that are no longer functioning. Democracy, after all, is not about voting; nor is freedom about consuming an ever-expanding array of goods. Democracy rests on our ability to communicate and compromise with each other. It depends on our willingness to work together to create solutions to our problems. It calls on ordinary people, not politicians, to take responsibility for our individual and collective lives, and beyond that, the life of our ecosystems, our planet.
Seven or eight years ago I loathed seeing the bumper sticker or hearing the term, “Freedom isn’t free.” This seemed so stupid, so paradoxical to me. “If freedom isn’t free,” I thought, “What the hell is it?” I knew what was trying to be communicated is that a certain vigilance and sustained effort is needed to preserve freedom; however, in the moment and the context of this popular slogan, I could not get on board, and the phrase itself filled me with the urge to deride and spit. The slogan does, however, hold a certain truth, especially when it is not embedded in an aggressive war effort and a denial of responsibility for what happens to us. If freedom indeed is not free and requires a certain energy expenditure, a certain vigilance, it is time for us to reassess what our responsibilities as citizens of a so-called democracy are. I would argue that our responsibilities do not include backing corrupt governments, and more famous minds than mine have proclaimed this thought. You know who I am talking about, those statuesque and revered great white fathers of the United States. I am also talking about Tecumseh and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. I want to invoke Gandhi as well as the Black Panthers; Thich Nhat Hanh as well as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dhorn.
No less than the survival of the Earth is at stake, and in the survival of the planet rests our own survival as a people. Beyond our mere physical survival, our spirits are tied to the Earth; we are born out of and into this planet just as a seed grows into a tree, then bears fruit. It’s my perception that we haven’t been giving much good fruit lately, and that there is much that is rotting right now. Let’s become fertile and fecund. Let’s recycle the rot and reuse the crumbling pieces of this outdated machinery to create more satisfying human environments. Let’s reduce our numbers and our consumption, and regenerate our cultures to ones that once again walk in beauty and in balance in and on our home, the Earth.
Resisting Progress 