The US SOTU and Missing the Point of Climate Change

President Obama mentioned climate change in his SOTU speech the other day.  He said that it is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing this generation and future generations and that his administration is making strides to address it: the landmark agreements between China and the US on reducing fossil fuel combustion and carbon pollution.It was an  admirable speech and yet it was also another example of missing the point on "climate change."

"Climate change" is Nature speaking to us, and the language that she is using is what we are calling climate.

Climate change is the mother of all feedback loops in the vast system we are calling climate, but which is indistinguishable from the vast system we call life.  It is life that maintains the climate of life - trees in the forest, plankton in the ocean, birds, land animals, fish.

Climate change is merely the symptom of our indifference to life, our willingness to pollute our own habitat and poison life, including our own life.  

That indifference to life is learned as a norm in a culture that places little value upon invisible, immaterial, unquantifiable necessities - life and nurturance, love and community. 

We do not learn to see life.  We are not taught to become connoisseurs of life, as we taught to be connoisseurs of material things.  

We do not learn to see life in the foreground, to take pleasure in life, in its beauties and its miracles, to value life above all else. 

Which is a mistake.  A fault in our logic as a civilization, which is creating the symptom called climate change.  

What else is more important than life?  It is the most basic, the most necessary.  

When we forget this, when we allow ourselves to forget and discount and degrade life, we lose our way.  Lowell Catlett says it this way: “You cannot have healthy human beings without contact with plants and animals.”

If we are not surrounded by life, the core of our being is empty - we are plagued, individually by neuroses and illness, and we become a civilization heading inevitably to the destruction of our own life-support system, to the degradation of our environment and of our souls.  “We fall back into the biological category of the potato bug which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself,” says Aldo Leopold. 

Climate change is Nature saying to humans: Change!  Re-orient yourselves to what is most important, stop and think about what is necessary for your own existence and health.  Re-define civilization in light of life.  Reach deep and see what you are.

Such a re-orientation is not a revolution.  It is not about political power, although it can be expressed in politics.  It is not a religion, although it might speak to what we hold sacred. It is a choice.  It is a shift in fundamental values that we can make going forward, it is a change in how we can make decisions and choose life paths and trajectories.  It is a way to imagine and define oneself and one’s relationship to the world.  It is a way to overcome the blind selfishness that our civilization teaches us and which spawns our irresponsible consumerism, our worship of dead things and empty symbols, and our implicit sanctioning of rapacious economic development, predatory wealth and power based on brutality.  

To value life is also selfishness because there can be no self without life.  It is simply a broader and more logical kind of selfishness.   To see life in the center of one’s being is to come home to what is most real, to wake up after a long, strange dream.  

Ali'i

My Catahoula hound Ali'i died a few days after Christmas.  There is so much good and beautiful still in my life, but Ali'i was a magnificent creature and the bond between us was intense.  Vicki Hearne, the writer and dog trainer, in her essay "Oyez a Beaumont," writes about the "dangerous ones" that take ahold of your heart and don't let go. Ali'i came from a line of dangerous hounds.  He was the grandson of my dog King, who hunted wild cattle with me in the high mountain forests, before we settled down to being staid and semi-respectable ranchers.  He was the great-great-grandson of my brother's dog Handsome, who was the first Catahoula I ever met, and whose eyes burned with a blue fire that I'll never forget.  Someday, perhaps, I'll look into a Catahoula puppy's eyes and see a glimmer of danger.  Maybe I'll still be strong enough to meet that dauntless gaze...

what I believe

Along the way we forgot something essential to our health, to our happiness, to our success.  We forgot that we are animals before we are humans.  That fault in our logic, in our self-understanding, has distorted just about everything that we do.  We do not take the simple fact of our bodies, our biology, our identity as animals among other animals into account.  Our philosophies, our cultures, our very psyches display the neuroses that we inflict on ourselves in this strange misunderstanding.  We constructed our human-ness, at least in the West, by dividing ourselves from the animals, by defining our human-ness as “not animal.”  To call a human an “animal” is an insult, we say “dumb animals,” we call our violent tendencies “animal” when no animal is as violent as we are, we construct cities and technologies as devoid of and hostile to non-human life as possible.

(Despite our obsessive attempts to do so, we have yet to come up with a convincing definition of what makes human animals distinct from the other animals, so untenable is the attempt and faulty the reasoning.)

We are a kind of animal - a complicated kind of animal, no doubt - but animal nevertheless.  We have needs and desires that have been left by the wayside in the development of our identity as “not-animal.”  Simple needs like the smell of green grass in the wind and the sight of stars at night.  We have build up around us systems, machines, environments which are hostile to our mental and physical health as we pursue the idea of ourselves as “not animal”: as builders of machines and of political and economic powers; as inheritors of Godʻs dominion over everything we see, as thinkers and spirits somehow divorced from our animal bodies.

And yet the soul in us - the anima - grows more and more distressed.  We have become animals under stress.  Yes, we are richer than we have ever been, and our lives are, generally, easier and more secure.  Yet our lives are also subtly painful and frustrating, as well as more and more frantic.

What do our souls need? How do we understand ourselves as the animals that we are? What is it that we really want and need, as humans? I believe these questions are inter-related.  I believe that we began to lose our way when we lost track of ourselves as animals, lost track of the anima within ourselves that is also within all living things.   I believe that the moment we began to denigrate and deny ourselves as animals was also the moment when we began the great project of control and domination of all other beings and the extraction of all resources exclusively for ourselves.  It was a powerful moment.  It was also a moment of terrible violence to ourselves and to all other life.  


And we have to ask: is that what we wanted?  Is that what we still want? 

why it is good to have evening chores

You catch all the weird stuff going on: last month it was lightning hitting ten feet away (sorry no pic), today it was a water spout. whoa!

The Rice is Cooking

There is an old Chinese tale about a young man who is travelling to the Capitol to take the annual Imperial examinations, and although he is a smart, ambitious, up-and-coming young scholar, as he would have to be just to qualify to take the Imperial examinations, he is walking, because that was how people traveled in those days before fossil fuel and in that country without much pastureland for horses.   One day, he falls into the company of a somewhat travel-worn but genial old man and they walk along together.  When the sun sets and dusk falls there is no town or inn, so they camp by the road.  They make a fire and set a pot of rice to cook for their dinner. As they are sitting around the campfire, they hear the clatter and rumble of a carriage coming along the road.  It so happens that the carriage breaks down just as it is passing the two travelers and the young man goes to see if he can help.  Because he is bright, capable young man his help is indispensable to fixing the carriage, which belongs to a high official of the Capitol.  The official, impressed by the young man's abilities, offers to take the young man with him to the city in his carriage.  The young scholar accepts and says his good-byes to the old man.  He goes to the Capitol and is wildly successful in the Imperial examinations. Furthermore he is helped in his career by the high official and quickly rises through the ranks of the Imperial government to become a high official himself.  He becomes immensely wealthy and a favorite of the Emperor; he marries a beautiful princess and has many talented, good-looking children.  He has it all - an Elon Musk, a Bill Gates, a Richard Branson. Then it all goes to hell.  He is accused of treason and mis-management by the other officials.  He is thrown in jail and his family is exiled. After suffering many years of imprisonment he is finally released.  All his wealth is gone and his family scattered. Beaten and broken, pre-maturely aged, he finds a small room to live in and manages to make enough to live on as a scribe in the marketplace of the Capitol. One day, as he is sitting in the marketplace he sees an old man, somewhat travel-worn, somehow familiar; the old man smiles at him and says: Wake up!  And the young scholar wakes up: there is the clatter and rumble of a carriage passing, the old man is dreaming by the fire, and the pot of rice has not yet done cooking.

The practical applications of a non-dualistic epistemology

Yes, we're going to do this thing, and it might not even hurt!

So, going back to Bateson and his definition of mind as a complex series of interactions between living creatures and their environment in which there is self-regulation (feedback-loops)  - how does this make a difference in everyday life?  

Well, for most of us farmer/rancher types living the non-dualistic lifestyle is as natural as breathing and losing money. As natural as trying to figure out the interactions of rainfall, topography, plant succession patterns under grazing pressure, the social patterns of cattle, wind direction, cash-flow and how all of that will affect the fence you are thinking of building. Except maybe you're not so much figuring it out as much as making some proposals for consideration in the form of the wisest fence you can imagine. 

Or, when looking at a piece of art, it's not that you are looking at a thing, so much as an interaction between material, human hand, human mind, and the particular entire ecosystem that cradles all of those.  And then you, looking at the "art" are now inside of that interaction, and how does it change you?

Or, standing next to someone in line at the supermarket...well, you can fill in the whole social part of that however you like... but the supermarket itself, convenient and necessary as it is, might be a problematic kind of mind for us to be taking part in as it so completely alienates consumers and producers, making one unconscious and the other over-burdened. 

Now, you

My gentle readers, all 4 or 5 of you (hey, thanks for hanging out with me) might be saying what is the point of all this hyper-intellectation? Why should you care about definitions of mind and theories of aesthetics and mapping and materialism? I really have no idea why you might care.  Why do I care? Sometimes I'm not sure myself. To replace one folly, one set of words, with another seems hardly worth the trouble.  The world is, and that's enough.  But here is why I care about all this, really, and it's the most dorkiest reason in the world: love.  Yep, the most cliched word ever.  But you see: 1. love is a verb, not a noun, and 2. there's all kinds of love, and as long as you live, you can keep on learning to love, in different and maybe better, braver, bigger ways.

This morning in the pre-dawn dark as I was driving my daughter to the bus and thinking about Bateson's use of Jung's distinction between Pleroma (dead matter, like stones) and Creatura (living things) to counteract the medieval Christian/Cartesian mind/matter dualism that has really f*cked us up as a civilization, I looked out into the distance across the Ka'u desert and saw the fiery orange glow of  our local live volcano Kilauea, and knew that Jung's distinction is not very, very distinct.

Also that I love that volcano.