Borderlands

I am in Phoenix - in the Valley of the Sun - in a hotel room with the air conditioning blasting full out. It is so different here from my usual environment, I hardly know what to think, I hardly know who I am. The “American way” seems overwhelming - the buildings so massive, the machines so pervasive, the wastefulness so ingrained. There doesn’t seem to be any alternative.  Do your job. Don’t ask questions. Try to keep up. Keep the wheels turning. Drive faster.

It is a kind of artificial paradise, a dream world. I believe in it and disown it at the same time. I believe in it practice. I rent a car and drive it through the tangle of freeways, air-conditioner blowing hard because the heat outside feels deadly. I take a long shower in water that has been pumped up from a depleting water-table.

I disown it in theory - in a kind of future tense. It can’t go on like this, right? This city keep growing and growing: more people, more houses, more cars, more water consumption, more air-conditioning. Perhaps it can, into infinity. Perhaps I don’t have a big enough imagination.

I see a headline in a newspaper: Arizona is growing faster than the national average.

***

I meet Bella, a white woman who is married to a Native American chief. She says to me: “We need a way out of this nightmare that we live in.”

I agree: what we need more than anything is a way out. A viable direction that does not lead to destruction. We have a direction - what we call civilization or The Way Things Are. But civilization is what drives us to destroy the very environment which we need to survive and thrive. Civilization makes us keep on driving and flying and buying and building. Civilization - at least the current version - is based on compulsive competition between humans.

Our plan is non-viable because it is partial, incomplete, and increasingly dysfunctional. It, perhaps inherently, lacks the ability to see the entire picture of human existence within our physical and biological environment.

It is a strangely disembodied approach to life. We have been captured - enslaved even - by the words, images, and sign systems that we ourselves created. We are polluting our own habitat, the actual world, in the pursuit of symbols and phantasms (money, profit, fame.) We are destroying the physical world - and harming our own bodies - in the name of fragile, transparent virtual worlds.

***

The plan we call civilization worked for a while, when there were not so many of us humans and an abundance of natural resources to discover, but that time is past and our plan is outdated.

The old plan was about individually and collectively figuring out how to discover, extract and process natural resources for human consumption and prosperity. The old plan only sees human needs. It is blind to the necessity of maintaining a non-human environment. It is all about taking - about being better at taking from the environment than everyone else.

The new plan has to come to terms with the concept that we are on a finite planet and that we need to share it with other forms of life. The old alternate theories of communism and socialism and even libertarian anarchism did not go back far enough: they all still assume that natural resources are dead material to be disposed in the sole interest of humankind. None of them question the foundations of civilization. None of them question human self-interest. None of them ask us to share our world with non-humans

Why do we need to share it? For the selfish reason that we probably won’t survive otherwise, but also because a living, flourishing world is better than a dead, destroyed one, and all other forms of life have an inherent value. We cannot value our own life without valuing it in other living beings.

What is the difference between the old plan and the new plan that we need to formulate? It is the difference between extraction and regeneration, the difference between exploiting and nurturing, between taking and giving. A viable plan will actively nurture Life on this planet: Life in all its variety and resplendence of species and natural systems.
The new plan, quite simply, is to nurture life. Starting exactly where you are. The new plan will call each of us to turn all of our human powers of strategizing, organizing, competing, and innovating from exploiting life to nurturing Life.
It starts with letting go. Letting go of the old idea of what it means to be a successful human. Letting go of the idea that you have to be better than anybody else in the terms of the old game. Letting go of the fear of death, weakness, and vulnerability. Letting go of the idea that only human selves matter. It starts with letting go in order to get bigger.

To be human means to be more than human, or at least it should be. Our challenge is to expand beyond the boundaries of our skins and the enclosures of human culture. We cannot be simply human, simply our species. Our humanity does not exist without the non-human. We are both dependent upon and enmeshed with the environment that we live in. We are our environment. That is the bigger self that we could strive for.
In becoming bigger, we can see more broadly and therefore more truly. Bigger, wiser, more engaged. In becoming bigger we can see farther and find a direction, a way out.

Barbarian at the Gates of St. Peter

I have been mulling something that I read in the Meditations of Thomas Traherne, the English poet and priest.  What he says is that faith in God is to the soul, as the soul is to the body.  This schema has helped me to understand religion in general, and monotheistic religions in particular.  That hierarchical vision of mind/body dualism that we all know so well from the history of Christianity, in which the body is a kind of animal controlled by the higher power of the soul has another layer, in Traherne's schema. Faith governs and inspires the soul as the soul inspires the body.  To put it another way, faith in God gives the faithful a kind of super-power.  A spiritual and moral super-power.  No wonder religion is so appealing! This individual super-power is on top of the social power that is concentrated and organized by religious institutions and shared by those who belong to a church, etc.  Traherne's formulation might not be so revelatory to someone with a better religious education than I, who was only lightly exposed to religion as a child, and never truly understood the appeal of the Abrahamic religions.  I can grasp a little better how important faith can be in a person's life.
What I love about Traherne is that he is an uncommonly honest and paradoxical mystic. He speaks of the amorphous with brutal clarity. He sees the violence that is half-concealed in Christianity and owns up to it. For him, universal oneness is not a nice feeling but a never-ending and total responsibility to all the world.

Climate Change and Indigenous Culture

Climate change is here, like the Old Testament God, with thunder and brimstone, hurricanes and drought.  I have a friend who is of the distinctly denial-ist cast of mind, and he can only say "well, what are we going to do about it?"  There is nothing we can do about it.  When your planet is raining judgment on your ass, there's nothing you can "do about it", as in try to get it to stop.  There's no bargaining with a planetary system, at least by such paltry beings as we are.
But we can mend our ways, not because it's going to "arrest" climate change, that isn't going to happen, but to start on the long, long road to making another way of life that might be viable in the long, long run.  A way of life that respects the inter-relationship between civilization and biology, rather than our current way of life that is based on us civilized humans shamelessly and short-sightedly exploiting biology (and geology and each other and everything that we can get our hands on.)  We've been refining the machine for thousands of years now - the civilizational machine that let us crush every indigenous culture that ever humbly co-existed with an environment.  "We" "won."  And in winning, it seems that we lost as much as we won.
I'm re-reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel," which is a fine book that presents an environmental explanations for why "the West" could crush every other culture in the world.  His explicit purpose is to counter the white supremacist argument, so common until relatively recently and still lurking out there at present, that "the West" "won" because white Europeans are better at everything.  Diamond's argument is convincing and necessary.
But I'm also arguing with the book as much as I am agreeing with it, because Diamond can't seem to help siding with the conquerors. Can't blame him, it's a long tradition in our culture to side with the winners,  because we're that kind of culture.  But being able to conquer and annihilate another culture is not winning.  This is becoming increasingly clear as our conquering machine of a civilization has come to the end of its leash, having poisoned all the wells and enslaved all the people.  So here we are, with the Arctic and Antarctic breaking apart, struggling to figure out how to live, when all those native peoples that we ran over maybe had some insights on the question.

BTW, come to the Hawaii Agricultural Conference y'all, where there will be multiple sessions on indigenous agriculture.

The Passion and Prejudice of the Newly Woke

I discovered feminism in college and for a couple of years that’s all I wanted to think about. Once I got my head around how to use it, I wanted to exercise that intellectual hammer to pound on anything that even vaguely resembled a nail. I came home on break and made incisive observations about my parents’ relationship, some of them out loud even, I’m embarrassed to remember. I’m still an ardent feminist but I’ve stopped being so childishly judgmental about it, I hope. It’s a tool to use, and actual people and their actual relationships are more interesting and a thousand times more complicated than any -ism ever invented. My radical feminist stage has matured to an ongoing practice that is less about judgement and more about compassion for everyone, both men and women, who have been ill-served by the age-old patterns of patriarchy. We can build better patterns, I am certain of it, and that certainty is more powerful than my old insurgency. But it will take time, that slow daily grind of making something real as dirt.
I try to remember my own fervent embrace of feminism when faced with people who seem a little drunk on ideology. For instance, those who, having recently become aware that their food doesn’t magically appear in the grocery stores, denounce “industrial agriculture” or “corporations” every time the existence of the modern food system comes up. Or that denounce “profit” and “corporations” because they’ve recently discovered capitalism and the kleptocratic patterns that it creates. The newly woke have to draw and enforce bright lines between good and evil, us and them, in order to consolidate and confirm their own understanding.
Likewise our species, homo sapiens, having created a new tool - a peculiar form of consciousness built around linguistic symbolism - are drunk as a new born feminist (or communist or nationalist or evangelical) on the power and possibilities that our ideological distinction seems to offer. We draw bright lines between us and them - us humans and all other forms of life that don’t have our kind of consciousness.
Only we humans matter because we are conscious; this is  the ideology we’ve lived by for thousands of years now, but a thousand years is nothing, a blink of the eye on the timescale of biology and geology.
It is a childishly selfish way to look at the world, an absolutism that hides our deep uncertainly. We are uncertain of the existence and meaning of our own consciousness. We know ourselves to be but newly woke, and that our time as this consciousness, this Me awoken from the darkness of all the ages that have come before, to be limited, imperiled, uncertain. It is a fragile, intricate, miraculous thing - this consciousness that we inhabit, that is all that we know.
Knowing this we are afraid for it.  We are so afraid of losing what we just got ahold of. We want to define and defend it, against all that is not conscious, against death, against our own mortal, biological bodies - even if that defensiveness doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s understandable, we’re new at this.