Plan C

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2

Find Your Reset Point

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Amidst the turmoil of debate, the successes and setbacks, the hope and despair in creating a more sustainable society – and set against the backdrop of protesters actively occupying the financial districts of the world – what is the value of retreat? 

What is the value of actually pressing the pause button completely to disengage from the world, including your quest to make it a better place? Of learning how to turn the mind inwards, and take refuge within the silence, the reset point, at the centre of your very being? 

How any of us achieve this is personal and unimportant. Some people like to meditate, others engage in mindful activities such as making bread. Still others like to walk in Nature and contemplate its beauty. What’s important is that you do it.

At first blush, the benefits seem profoundly individual, even selfish. But a choice to prioritise your personal peace, taking a retreat from the inherent madness of the modern world, is not a way of escaping our responsibilities. It is, instead, a profoundly revolutionary act.

Once the surface noise of our angry or despairing thoughts about the environment, or modern world, begin to quiet down, we begin to detach from the outcome we want to see and a more reflective and creative state of mind can emerge, one that can be applied, once again, to our quest for a better, fairer more sustainable world. 

Once we begin to trust the silence within as a source of nourishment, our fear and sense of vulnerability about the planet can be embraced as confirmation that we are, in fact, deeply connected to the web of life everywhere.

Above all, each time we turn inwards and retreat we challenge the prevailing paradigm that wants us to believe that moments of quiet reflection are purposeless and self-interested, that disengaging is synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and the greatest sin of all: being out of touch with the next ‘new’ new thing. 

When we affirm that the emptiness inside doesn’t need to be constantly filled with the ephemeral whims of consumption, we give permission for others to also discover it as a resource rich in energy. In the silence, ideas which can galvanise our sense of purpose have space to grow.

Try stopping for 20 minutes, 3 times a day, to reflect and quieten your mind, in your own unique way.  In what ways do your thoughts and feelings about the environment change?

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 3 ‘Adopt a new aesthetic’ coming soonish. 

 

 

 

 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 1

Accept Your Pain About the Environment is a Reflection of Your Own Suffering

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

 

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will. Humanity is in charge. Humanity caused the problem. Humanity will fix it. Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference. Our perception of the Earth's suffering may actually reflect our own deepest feelings. It’s not the Earth that’s dying but our worldview.

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own deep sense of fragility and of loss; of the pain that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, and no longer systemically sustainable. Our belief that we can 'fix' things with a lot of angry, unexamined, frenetic activity is just one example of the need to control that sense of loss. Indeed it's the kind of meddling that got us into trouble in the first place.

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will. Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part, of Her whole? A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?

If we recognised this, we can as Satish Kumar says move from an egocentric worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours, to an ecocentric worldview, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

This may sound like the ramblings of dyed in the wool greenies, like a touchy-feely paean to deep ecology – like that made popular by the blockbuster movie Avatar – and yet, it is absolutely necessary if we are to rediscover our integral place within the web of life.

Rather than play the hero and act to rescue a dying planet because, yes, it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, but also maybe to glorify ourselves and our resourcefulness as a species, do we have the courage to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature instead?

Can we take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature to see it with new eyes, until its interconnective web, of which we are a valued and important part, is revealed?

The act of saving ourselves may in the end be a passive one, one where we do less not more. And having stepped back in that way, would we then, secure in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources?

Take time to consider from what perspective you are viewing your relationship with the Earth?  Is She broken?  Are you the saviour? Is She able to heal Herself?  And if so, is our part in that active or passive, or both? What have you to learn from Her? 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2 ‘Find Your Reset Point’ coming soonish. 

Plan C’s Road Map To Creating Sustainable Change From The Inside Out

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

It’s over 18 months since we began our quest at Plan C to shift the focus of environmental debate from ‘what kind of world do we want?’ to ‘what kind of people do we have to become to make that world and then live in it sustainably, peacefully, intelligently and courageously?’

During that time our intuition that who we are being in relation to our cause, is equally as important as what we are doing, has only strengthened.

Our discussions - on this site and off - have taken us into deep territory. From the nature of beauty, via our responsibility not to see the earth as a victim, to the role of intuition in guiding us forward, we have begun to recognise certain themes, certain signposts, pointing the way for people who are also beginning to intuit that sustainable change is only possible from the inside out.

Proposing a fixed road map, a prescriptive formula for how to become the dynamic intersection for the political, economic and environmental transitions we need to make today, is not our objective at Plan C.

However, it seems wise to try and articulate the terrain we see. Make clear some of the path.  Point out the pitfalls we've noticed that prevent us from being more effective in our collective quest to create a more sustainable and loving society.

Over the next few months, or however long it takes, we’ll be posting our Road Map to Creating Sustainable Change from the Inside Out, part by part.  You are welcome to read these thoughts as a set of linear steps to follow, or, enjoy them as different facets of the same jewel. 

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

 

We don't need another...video

Pat Thomas

 

I should have loved the Wayseer Manifesto video – which aims to unite those of us who stand outside the mainstream into a powerful, creative movement. But it left me cold and I think I know why. This is what happens when a 'gathering of the tribe' becomes a dysfunctional marketing exercise...

Once, in a former incarnation, I sat in a room full of pregnant women. I was facilitating a workshop on the practical, emotional and spiritual aspects of home birth. During the course of the afternoon it became apparent that many of the women felt keenly just how outside the system their thinking and their actions were and how disapproving so many of the people around them were. I asked, half joking, “How does it feel to be a freak?”. As we began to explore the F-word in more detail half the women in the room burst into tears.

I saw my own life experience being mirrored back to me.  “Don’t be such a dreamer”. “You’re being impractical”. “You romanticise everything”. “What do you mean you ‘just know’?”. “That’s not the way we do things”. "You've got to learn to fit in”. “Don’t be so sensitive”. “You just have to develop a thicker skin”. My mother told me, repeatedly, that I would never have a husband because I was too clever.

I’ve lived with it all my life. I know, as these women did, that the very traits that society says are my weaknesses are actually my strengths. In fact, I sometimes think that women, living in what is still such a macho society, know this best of all. We either believe in ourselves, love ourselves, or we die a slow, agonising pseudo-death which leaves us walking around in the world with nothing holding us up but that thicker skin so highly prized by the patriarchy.

So why did I feel so mad when I watched the new video, Wayseer Manifesto by author Garret John LoPorto?

This ‘manifesto’, aiming to unite the freaks of the world into a powerful creative movement, was posted without comment on one of my favourite websites just to see what everyone’s reaction would be. It’s an alternative web community so most of the reactions were from the same dozen people who always react in the same old way “Fucking brilliant” “Just what I needed” “WOW!”.

One newbie waded in saying it seemed more like Bono-like proselytising, reminding everyone that the main purpose of the video was to sell the book and that the video would probably end up being the template for the next Apple or Nike advertising campaign.

In fact, it has already been an Apple ad. 

Said newbie was given short shrift by the ‘community’. So was I when I made a small joke about the length of the video being incongruent with holding the attention of a community of people with ADD/ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, dyslexia, narcissism, Asperger’s, anxiety, depression, risk-taking and sensation seeking tendencies and addictive personalities. Some of them may well watch it 20 times in a row and decide that LoPorto is their new guru, but some may lose interest or feel overwhelmed or decide to go off and make their own video after the first couple of minutes.

Garret LoPorto, it turns out, is an advertising exec/inventor whiz kid who, like many of us outsiders, has come to the conclusion that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So he has chosen to focus on the strengths of his own Attention Deficit Disorder rather than its weaknesses, and encourages others to do the same.  It’s a good plan. I like that he advocates dealing with mental illness through something creative, something other than drugs. But at the same time I’m not sure a high-octane, fast-cut video is the best way to sell the message to what is a very specific crowd with very specific needs.

What is more, not all outsiders have a mental illness. Not all are unable to function in the world. Some of us simply choose not to participate. Some of us just think – and therefore act – differently. 

The kind of upheaval we are seeing in the Middle East and in parts of the US where workers are fighting for a basic right to join unions and organise, makes us all ache for change – a change of thinking, a change of direction, a change of scenery, of values, patterns and narratives in our lives. We want it and we want it now, with the ease of a mobile phone upgrade.

Not only that, but the way this upheaval has been framed in the media makes us think that change is fast – and linear and lasting. It isn’t. Anyone can throw a stone or hold up a banner. Anyone can make a video about how crap their life is and how misunderstood they are and post it on your tube, anyone can tweet about revolution. Real changemakers are, by their nature, a rare thing. They are often very insular and their influence like water on stone; drip-drip-drip until the shape of a thing begins to change.

As influenced as we are by media it is all too easy to be sucked into an uncritical assumption that if someone says something loud enough and long enough and makes a flashy video where his own face is intercut with iconic footage of John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Mohammed Ali et al, he must be saying something profound. Time will tell.

Meanwhile the clock ticks and the water drips...I’m still trying to figure out what made me so mad.

I think it was the idea that 90% of society is wrong and we – the 10% of the population who for whatever reason see things differently and have to endure being called crazy for it – are right. The truth is creative, crazy geniuses need some sort of anchor or structure for their great ideas to take form, otherwise all you get is the crazy without the creative. Every crazy fucker who ever had a crazy idea for change, had a wife or a mother or mentor or an agent who held the rest of their life together – who did the dishes and paid the rent and reminded them to eat and bathe once in a while – so they could be totally free to think big thoughts and buck the system.

I think also it was the way that the Wayseer Manifesto – underneath the feel good message and the glamorous presentation – was promoting EXACTLY the kind of exclusion behaviour and derision of others that has caused so much damage and pain to those of us who stand outside the mainstream. Is this the new tribe, the new generation, the leading edge? Or is it just “Meet the new boss...same as the old boss”?

If the continual environmental disasters and political upheaval we’ve been witnessing over the last few years tells us anything it’s that none of us is immune, that the personal is political and vice versa and that we are all in this together. When the next nuclear meltdown happens, when the next wave (real or symbolic) sweeps over us, it’s not going to care who is a ‘freak’ and who is ‘straight’. Screwed is screwed. Dead is dead. We have to find a way to stand together or we fall alone. And to be part of the group whilst maintaining personal integrity and resilience – and the confidence to be whomever you might be – requires tough inner work and feminine receptivity, not slick superficial sloganeering and macho posturing.

This post was originally featured on Pat's wbesite, Howl at the Moon. See here.

 

This is the show, and it's not going to get any better, any time soon, without you. SO STOP WATCHING THE TV AND GET ON BOARD!

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Have you become a natural disaster junkie?  It makes compelling viewing doesn't it?

Check the body count for a few days after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Monitor news daily to see if the fourth nuclear reactor has blown up in Japan, after the recent tsunami.

Did you keep track of how many flights were grounded last year, when the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland erupted?  Shake your head as the Haiti earthquake death toll rose to 250,000 plus. Hold your breath over last year’s Sumatran earthquake and the resulting tsunami; would it be as devastating as the 2004 Indian Ocean quake/tsunami the force of which was helpfully measured by the scientists as being the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, claiming at least 225,000 lives? And what about those Chilean miners and their two months underground?

Be honest, are you secretly pleased by every new distraction that our earth is offering up with increasing frequency?

These are devastating acts of nature – for which we believe there are no explanations and over which we have no control. In many ways it is easier to live with the cold quantification of these disasters, the body counts, millisieverts leaked, the tonnes of wreckage, the cubic litres of ash, hours of oxygen left than it is to feel anything real.

Yet, perhaps, this is to be expected. The natural human tendency to stand like a deer in the headlights, in front of a truck rushing towards us does seem to beggar belief, but should we really wonder?

Afterall, Hollywood has done such a fine job of anaesthetising us to the reality of significant weather and earth based phenomena, with an endless stream of disaster movies, dating back beyond Towering Inferno from the 70s, that we are left unable to distinguish the difference between a tsunami in the film 2012, and the tsunami that destroyed so much of Sendai last week.

Emotionally numb we may at best be moved by one event – but dare we connect the dots and not just consider whether they are related, but whether we are culpable; whether human-created climate change is driving these disasters?

But how could they be?  A volcano in Iceland, surely can't be connected to an earthquake in Japan, or a flood in Australia?  We can relate, perhaps to a hurricane being linked to climate change, but a causal chain including earthquakes, and or volcanoes is harder to grasp and more often the domain of people who knock at your door and invite you into a discussion about the Old Testament.

And yet the possibility that the greenhouse effect causes the earth's tectonic plates to shift is something that serious scientists are now willing to speculate on, see here and, here.

It’s possible – but hey, why wait for the data before deciding what to do?

You know the moment it comes in someone's going to dispute it, and even if they don't, it won't lead to anything more than incremental change on a governmental level, so why not do something completely different as the basis for making your own mind up.

Granted, this something isn't that easy when your head's full of the latest news reportage, so you may want to switch off your TV set before you try it.

What we're proposing is that you listen to your intuition.  That's right.

Undervalued and at best recognised as a so called soft skill in the business world, intuition, or our gut instinct or sixth sense, is probably the most powerful barometer of what to do that we have today.

It takes courage to say, y'know, I don't care whether the idea that Climate Change is man-made is disputed, or whether there are in fact cyclical patterns of extreme weather historically, I'm still going to change my behaviour in relationship to the earth, because that's what my intuition tells me to do.

Today, our hearts tell us that humanity has a reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the earth, and that if we all acted in harmony with Her we would experience a fundamentally different world.

We'd cling less to dramatic headlines and the comfort of our TV experts, we wouldn’t blur the lines between natural disaster and man-made catastrophe, we'd sync into natural cycles and JUST KNOW what our place in all this was.

Humans are the only living things that compulsively live and work against their own natural cycles, and as such against their own well being. Homosapien is an entire race of Homer Simpsons sticking its fingers into a light socket over and over again to see if maybe THIS TIME we get a different result. Intuition cuts through this crazy behaviour.

Our hearts tell us that living simply and closer to the land is not just common sense but ultimately the key to lasting happiness and a fulfilled life.

That individual rights and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive, and that in fact loving service of others is the key to Self discovery.

Our intuition tells us to reject the idea that we are all helpless victims of life. And most importantly that we don't need another extreme weather event to verify our intuition to live in harmony with the earth.

As the earthquake rocked Japan and split open her nuclear reactors, Nick arranged a barter with his neighbour, to acquire his first Bee hive that will soon help to pollinate his family's vegetable plot and increase its yield.

Pat planted seeds. Just three windowsills and some pots – but in the middle of the city this is her Eden, her way of staying grounded and putting something back.

What does your intuition tell you to do?

 

 

 

Toward a beauty-centric education

Sandra B. Lubarsky

 

The two statements I hear most often whenever I bring up the subject of beauty are "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "Beauty is only skin deep."

Beauty, in other words, is subjective and superficial. End of discussion.

But until about the seventeenth century, most people thought that beauty was objectively present in things. In the East and the West, beauty was associated with holiness — and with the harmony and patterns of wholeness. The Buddha's friend and first disciple, Ananda, once remarked to his master that, "Half the holy life, O master, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful." To this, the Buddha replied, "Say not so, Ananda, say not so. It is not half the holy life. It is the whole of the holy life."

For Westerners, beauty existed in the world because of God: God was understood as being both perfectly beautiful and the reason for all created beauty. The work of God was the kosmos, literally, the order of things, in contrast to primordial chaos. Now, the word "cosmos" has been claimed by the beauty industry: a cosmetologist is someone who puts your face in order. Likewise, the word "aesthetics" now refers to the art of manicure, facials, and eyebrow shaping. But the word literally means "to feel" — its opposite is anaesthetic.

For many reasons, beauty has lost its status as elemental to the structure of the universe. Our dominant value system today is one in which money and material goods are most coveted. We live in a world in which "time is money" and in which attention to detail and to the demands of beauty is considered unnecessary extravagance. Science tells us that beauty isn't objectively real because it can't be weighed or measured. In a scientifically oriented world, we are trained to seek clear definitions before we enter into sustained inquiry, but one of beauty's most notorious deficiencies is that it seems to be resistant to definition. Many feminists as well have happily washed their hands of beauty, having experienced the demeaning effects of beauty on women. In a world of genocide and ecological decline, many artists have felt that beauty is hardly adequate to the psychological and political landscape of modernity.

Any effort to teach about sustainability presupposes the resurrection of the natural world and its value. The shift from nature as machine to nature as organism must also include a shift from beauty as a subjective value, only in the eye of the beholder, to beauty as the value that clothes life itself. This is a dramatic shift, since we have practically lost our language for beauty and our confidence in speaking of it. But beauty is intrinsic to an ecological paradigm. Life is not value-neutral; to be alive is to embody intrinsic value.

While life and beauty are not one and the same, they dance cheek to cheek. In a rhythm of reciprocity, beauty enhances life and life reaches toward beauty. Life that runs away with itself, as in the unchecked growth of cancer cells, is self-destructive; it is life against life. Life that exists in harmony, coherence, and balance (all words associated with beauty) with other life is life-promoting. This is life that wears the mantle of beauty. We have called it by the name of health, too, and of wholeness, words that are in kinship.

If we endeavor to mould a civilization in which wholeness, coherence, relationality, and feeling are central concerns, in which refining and enlarging our sensitivities to the life that surrounds us and is in us, then beauty must be embraced as a guiding principle — not an aside or an "also" — but as a core aspect of inquiry in our educational systems.

Teaching about sustainability, then, requires more than teaching about ecosystem relations, biological processes, and policy development. Sustainable education involves teaching strategies for life affirmation. Such an approach moves us away from excessive dependence on what has become the standard goal and tool of modern education, critical thinking — which also has its philosophical home in a mechanistic worldview in which knowledge is the detached examination of parts. When critical thinking is our primary tool for understanding the world, we must wonder how we can avoid the mess on the shop floor — the motors, flywheels, screws, and gaskets lying helter-skelter after the lesson in taking the world apart. Education that is beauty-centric will not neglect to study the parts, but it will not mistake the part for the whole or the whole for a mere collocation of parts. Such wholeness is an aspect of both an ecological worldview and a beauty-centric education.

Wes Jackson, who runs the Land Institute in Kansas, often shows his audiences a photo of an old oil tank, rusting away in the middle of a farmer's field. For him, that tank is a symbol of the kind of farming that he is against — farming that depends on oil rather than renewable energy. But the tank is not only an image of unsustainable farming practices; it is also an image of ugliness. There is a relationship between sustainability and beauty, and we need to begin to speak that relationship in order to give emotional honesty to our ecological work. If we do not say, "This tank is ugly, and so are these buildings, and this land use," we continue to be yoked to the mechanistic worldview which deprived the intellect of an emotional life.

The psychotherapist James Hillman has posed the sorts of aesthetic questions that must be added to our educational agendas. "What is the cost," he asks, "to physical well-being and psychological balance of careless design, of cheap dyes, inane sounds, structures, and spaces? To pass a day in an office under direct glaring light, in bad chairs, victim of the constant monotonous hum of machine noise … among artificial plants … and then, at day's end, to enter the traffic system … fast food, project housing — what does this cost? What does it cost in absenteeism, in sexual obsession … overeating and short attention span, in pharmaceutical remedies and gigantic escapism industries of wasteful shopping, chemical dependency, etc? Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?"

For the past two hundred years it must be admitted that we have failed beauty. We have allowed it to remain in the background of almost every human endeavor. And in failing beauty we have become a culture that cannot distinguish between longing and craving. Perhaps worst of all, we have made way for a singular value system — economism. What has been left empty by the death of beauty has been filled by relentless acquisitiveness. Indeed, until beauty becomes part of the foreground of our cultural life, we will not see a successful shift to an ecological paradigm.

If beauty is a core dimension of life, then to diminish it and belittle it is to diminish and belittle our own lives. Allowing beauty to play a role in the kind of education that we offer, encouraging our students to contribute to the beauty of the world, is, I believe, one of our most important strategies for sustaining the world.

Sandra B. Lubarsky is founding director of a masters program on sustainable communities at Northern Arizona University (http://home.nau.edu/sus), where she is also professor of religious studies.  She has written on religion and the environment, pluralism, and process thought and is currently at work on a manuscript on "Beauty and Sustainability."  She can be reached at Sandra.Lubarsky@nau.edu.

This essay first appeared at http://www.ecoliteracy.org.

What do you do when the hand of fate presses pause?

Nick Kettles

It’s a rainy day at a fete in beautiful, rural South West France, near the Pyrenees.  The tannoy system is being manned by a jovial man in his fifties, tasked with the job of announcing the next event, prize winners and parking problems over the crackly microphone.   

He’s doing a Stirling job, not only with his key announcements, but also his charming, running commentary about local history, the minutiae of a typical French village celebration, and what it was like last year when it wasn’t raining.    

One suspects he may be filling the spaces between his key announcements, to keep people interested in spite of the rain, in the same way DJ’s waffle on in between records, or simply to avoid the whine and whistle caused by turning a tannoy on and off, too often.  But then something happens which reveals there may be a different reason for his bubbling banter.   

The generator which has been keeping the tannoy system running, runs out of petrol without warning, and leaves our announcer suddenly severed from his audience. 

Without his banter, the contrast is stark.  It is uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do. Everyone suddenly stops moving and talking, like marionettes without an animator. <

The awkward silence stretches on, people shuffle disorientated, heave and sigh, talk in muffled voices, avoid each other’s gaze, before finally, like a clarion call that life has once more commenced, the generator roars into life and after a long whining noise signalling the tannoy is back in action, the announcer reanimates us, and we shuffle on to resume our pre-interruption tour of the fete.

Could it be that even in rural France, where many still rise in the morning to the sound of the cock crowing people have become so conditioned to aural blight through different media from an early age, that they need a constant stream of background noise, in order to feel comfortable with themselves?

Or, more likely, that they are just like nearly every other human being in the Western world, who feels naked, exposed and vulnerable, when the system they have invested so much faith in temporarily breaks down?

I would venture that this is exactly how the many thousands of people left stranded by the grounding of thousands of air flights across Europe felt.

I wonder if any of them, saw it as an opportunity to reconsider their place in the world, and whether another way of living in relation to the earth and each other, is possible?   

How many will have considered what their lives might be like without the pineapple chunks form Ghana or baby sweetcorn from Thailand or cut flowers from Africa, which arrive on their supermarket shelves via air cargo freight plane?    

If some of them had stepped out of the airport waiting lounge, for a while will they have noticed that in the sky free of contrails, the birds were singing louder – no doubt appreciating the opportunity to call for a mate in daylight.   

Previous reports suggest that  London birds had taken to singing at night, because they couldn’t get a tweet in edgewise above the noise pollution to which air flights contribute significantly.

Or, might they have taken the opportunity to be curious about the people sitting next to them, beyond the fact they were waiting for the same flight.  If they had struck up conversation, how many would have reached the same conclusions Corrina Gordon-Barnes explores in her incredibly prescient blog post “When All The Planes Are Grounded.”?    

Or will people have simply associated these moments of quiet reflection as synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and, more worryingly, the fear of being out of touch with what the next ‘new thing’ is? 

Always on, comfortably numb by degree, and completely oblivious of our place in the world, until the hand that turns the wheel of fate presses the pause button momentarily and we are forced to reconsider our raison d’etre for existing?   

We don’t need to wait for further Nature inspired interruptions, such as Iceland’s volcanic eruption, to wake us from our stupor, and knock us from our Hamster wheels, but that may be the only way we learn to reconnect with the web of life, where our inter-dependence is self evident in every choice we make.

If they do come, the first step will be to recognize that our fear and sense of vulnerability is not a sign of impending doom, but instead a powerful emotion which can be used to raise our awareness of not just how to deal with contingency, but to also consider a new way of being and relating with one and other.

When Words Fail Us

David Key

On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see around them.

So often words are the first and most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they fail us.

To run out of words is to stand at the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending adventure, the fear of formlessness.

Where the words finish and the white page is left, where the blizzard-filled sky meets the pure white of a snowy horizon: at this edge we can choose either to enter a dead end of desolation and nihilism, or a space filled with infinite possibility – the ‘potential space’ for creating a new form of consciousness altogether.

Language has it’s limits, just like the human beings that use it. When we reach these limits, the words run out. Now that we are experiencing the unsettling symptoms of global climate change and of the Earth’s finite capacity to support us, should it be any surprise to find ourselves speechless?

It’s not just the Inavialut culture that is lost for words.

While we have been busy evolving our post-modern languages to communicate the onslaught of technology and the giddy ecstasy of our own apparent cleverness, we have missed the fact that the world we have learned to describe – the world we have apparently evolved to live so well in – is increasingly a virtual world created by seductive marketing and the haphazard structural violence of our post-industrial culture.

A language unhitched from the simple ecological realities of life.

English has been abused, it has been moulded to fit an arrogant, abstract, disconnected, technocratic, dominating and violent culture. It is less now a language from the land, more a trade-marked and branded servant of industrialism: from text to txt.

We are left unable to articulate the complex ecological danger we are in – a bewildering experience for our seemingly sophisticated species. Our intellectual separation of mind from matter and of body from spirit, has led to a chasm between our contemporary description of selfhood and the blood and soil of our own Earthy existence.

Language emerges through humans from land, an expression of our connection to place.

To be lost for words is a call to reconnect with home.

The Inavialut language’s short comings in describing a rapidly changing human ecology point not to its inability to evolve, but to the way it connects a specific place with a specific language. When the exotic curiosities of another land suddenly arrive, the language cannot cope.

Lightning, Barn Owl, Hornet, Robin, Elk, Salmon, Wasp, Thunderstorm

These are words in English that the Inuvialut have no equivalent for in their own language; English words that describe things that have been displaced by climate change – change that is exceeding the speed of industrial evolution.

Some languages are still connected, still embedded. ‘The Okanagan word for ‘our place’ and ‘our language’ ‘, writes Jeanette Armstrong, ‘is the same. The Okanagan language is thought of as the ‘language of the land.”

In Siberia, it’s a shift in emphasis that reveals the ecological change:

‘In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on.’

There is less ‘umughagek’ , less safe ground: We’re all on thin ice.

Many contemporary indigenous languages connect to concepts in ways that are geophysical. In modern European languages, Kenneth White calls this ‘geopoetics’ and suggests that poetry is the path to re-engage with land.

‘More than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than literature with some sort of geographical content… Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.’

This is the way home: Opening through poetry to a new consciousness. A new language of the Earth, born of the Earth.

Poetry sits at the periphery of language, the last linguistic outpost before silence, before blank white space.

William James wrote in 1902 that one of the four characteristics of a mystic experience is, “Ineffability – its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”

Poetry is the metaphysical edge of human language, a conduit to the mystic, a place along the continuum of expression just before the point where experience becomes ineffable.

A loss of words indicates the presence of powers beyond human control, powers that contain human Being, along with the collective unconscious of the whole Universe. When we meet these forces in the physical realm, we are humbled – in any language.

Our wordlessness is testament to this threshold and at this point the balance of power in the socially constructed dualism between humans and Nature is dissolved. We go, as indigenous Australians say, “back in”.

In poetry, it is not so much the words themselves, but the whiteness around them, the spaces between them, where the possibility of a new language lies. It’s there in The Void, in the linguistic wilderness, that form can start to take shape around the nuclei of a new ecological consciousness.

It’s in the physical wilderness too that the same ecological consciousness can take root.

It’s fascinating that in the vast white snowscape of the arctic, where the language of the Inavialut embeds them in their oikos, their home, there lies a similar parallel ontology of white space.

Nothingness, no-thing-ness.

To transcend the numbing complexities of human existence, the philosopher Martin Heidegger would take his students skiing. The ski tip breaking track in the snow, he proposed, was the closest he could get to a description of human Being. He called the space created as the ski tip broke the snow, ‘the clearing’.

Poetry signs the way into the clearing. Entering the whiteness of the page parallels a journey into wilderness, deep into the choice between nihilism and infinite possibility.

Is the poetry of the wild then, the clearing into which the new languages of the Earth can manifest? Is our loss of words not a loss at all, but the opening of a window into a new Earth consciousness?

David Key is a founding director of Footprint Consulting.  A longer version of this post, inc references first appeared at EcoSelf.Net

David thanks Mary-Jayne Rust in creating this post.

To rescue or to restore..

Nick Kettles

How we talk about the Earth and the language we use probably determines and influences our relationship with the Earth more than we think.  

Contrast the idea of the earth being sick, the subject of a brutal rape by the forces of progress, with the view offered in the draft resolution, entitled Harmony with Mother Earth  (A/C.2/64/L.24) which Bolivia presented to the United Nations in November last year (2009). 

“One of the greatest discoveries of civilization was the realization that the Earth is not flat and that we live on a globe. Today we are in the midst of a much larger discovery regarding the nature of our home. To know that Earth is not only round but it is a WHOLE.”

Yes, you read that correctly.  WHOLE.  Meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, complete, in an unbroken or undamaged state, with no part removed.  

Take a moment to consider this.  If the Earth is Whole, how can it be fragile, raped, dying? 

Is it possible She can be both of these things at the same time? That may be possible in the realm of theoretical quantum mechanics, but what’s more likely is that we perceive that the Earth is suffering, because that’s actually how we feel.  It’s not the Earth that’s dying but us.   

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own sense of deep hurt about our place in the world and perceived sense of impotence in our ability to make a difference and play our part.  Our sense of disempowerment by the relentless drive of progress that insists we sacrifice well being for wealth, and our health for happiness. 

Perhaps for some, these feelings are rooted in a deep sense of loss, that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, dying; no longer systemically sustainable.  

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will.  Humanity is in charge.  Humanity caused the problem.  Humanity will fix it.  Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.   

But who really is in charge here?  Is it really us?   

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference.     

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will.  Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part of Her whole?  A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?    

With such a view, would our approach to addressing the impact of climate change be any different?   

Rather than act to rescue a dying planet, because it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, would we instead act to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature?

Where once the idea of rescuing fair maiden Mother Earth, provided the clarion call the environment movement needed to mobilise itself, today it’s more likely to impel the kind of evangelism which can and does cause people to switch off and disengage.  It is not that the urgency of those who want to rescue the earth is misplaced – it’s better to act than do nothing – it’s just the idea of rescuing anything suggests that the perceived victim cannot help themselves, and that in turn can leave us feeling helpless at the enormity of the task at hand. 

What’s more likely, in fact, is that without us (humanity) the Earth would do just fine and recover to a relative state of Harmony quite quickly, with the number of species that benefitted significantly exceeding the number that suffered.  Even genetically modified crops would, in the absence of spraying (for which they are resistant at a metabolic cost to the plant), be disadvantaged and probably die out.  

It may be the idea that the Earth needs us and cannot survive without our intervention is perhaps another projection of our own deep seated and egocentric need to be needed.  Not only to be seen, heard, and useful, but to feel that we matter, that we can play an important role, and fulfil our part in the Whole.  This too, is a perfectly human urge to have, and yet, again our point of view makes all the difference.

As Satish Kumar has often said, it only takes one letter to move from egocentric with an individual worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours - to ecocentric, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

It's quite possible that an ecocentric world view is what emerges when we see that the best role we can play in combating climate change, is not to take up arms on the street, but to actively seek to restore our relationship with the Earth. 

Take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature, to see it with new eyes, until it’s inter connective web, or which we are a valued and important part, is revealed.

Would we then, assured in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources? 

Green. With Envy.

Pat Thomas

Climate scientist James Hansen once went on record to condemn the scientific reticence that stopped so many scientists from saying what they knew about the scale and speed of climate change.

 

This reticence, he said, muddied the debate and cost the world valuable time that could have been spent looking for solutions.

 

It’s not just the science of climate change that suffers from reticence. So does the psychology of change, which may be why, when there seems to be so much activity around climate change, so much undeniable evidence that we must change direction, so few are doing anything constructive.

 

Reports by groups like the American Psychological Association have looked at the psychological drivers of and reactions to climate change and why, even when faced with such overwhelming evidence of a need for change, we don’t. They say it’s anxiety and helplessness, rather than ambivalence or apathy, that are the biggest barriers to effective action.

 

But it’s not like we haven’t heard these words before. Anxiety, helplessness powerlessness – words that just wash over us these days, barely sticking long enough to make an impact.

 

Let’s pick a new word: envy.

 

Acknowledging the psychology of climate change, of how we got here in the first place would seem crucial, but so often this is dismissed as a bit too 'touchy feely' – not practical when there is so much ‘real’ work to be done in the ‘real world.’

 

And yet everything you need to know about our inability to act is summed up in this word.

 

Envy is like gravity – a powerful force that affects everything it touches. It arises when a person feels they lack what the other has and either longs to possess it or wishes that the other person did not possess it.

 

Most crimes are based on envy, our politics are based on envy, our economy and consumer culture is certainly is based on envy, indeed we have institutions called advertising agencies whose sole purpose is to stimulate and regulate envy amongst the population in order to stimulate growth.

 

Ironic, since envy is the one emotion most likely to stunt real growth over the longer term.

 

We envy our children too.

 

That’s a fact, though of course we deny the depth of what that means. Nevertheless, we envy them their future, their connection with nature, their creativity, their strength and vitality, and the possibility of global healing, dare I say ‘world peace’, that we have never grasped.

 

By doing nothing in the face of climate change we are in fact enacting a very malicious form of envy that has become an important driver of so much of the environmental devastation we face today.

 

Envy poisons the river, uses up the resources, privatises the commons, scars the landscape. It sucks emotional intelligence dry and dehumanises whatever it touches. Destruction of the natural world is envy directed at making sure our children can’t have what we can’t have – the future. Framed in this context, envy is a desire to be finished with this world before it is finished with us.

 

The drive from which envy springs is very human, but that doesn’t mean we have to give in to it, or worse ignore it.

 

In a very different world – the world that has to emerge and quickly – we would be staking a claim in the future through our children and acting not only to preserve the future, but to equip our children with the tools they need to thrive.

 

And, by the way, that doesn’t mean the latest IPhone apps.

 

It means leading by example, being parents instead of pals, teaching that our actions have consequences both intended and unintended, it means morphing our pride in ‘my son the lawyer’ into ‘my son the farmer’, insisting on schools that teach our children to think critically and divergently, to encourage environmental literacy and for God’s sake stop faffing around with debates about whether climate change and peak oil are real or not.

 

Yes, of course it is overwhelming, and given our envy-based society, it’s so easy to feel anxiety, helplessness and powerlessness – and then do nothing about it.

 

What’s harder to ‘get’ is that this pervasive sense of helplessness, depression and just plain exhaustion is a direct result of a life lived in envy. Envy doesn’t just suck the life out of the envied; it sucks the life out of the envier. It disconnects us from our humanity, makes authentic relationships with others nearly impossible and drives the sort of addictive behaviour that we find it hard to save ourselves, let alone our children, from.

 

Is it any wonder we don’t have the energy to fix the world?

 

The bottom line is: you can’t be green with envy. The level of self awareness required to be ‘green’ is completely incompatible with a life lived in envy. And although people who feel empty in themselves often find it difficult to be generous, the more we give of ourselves, the more the world returns to us.

 

Acknowledging our responsibility to the future also frees up amazing reserves of energy that we can invest in a more meaningful now.

 

Let’s give our kids a break. Let’s give our communities, our economy and our planet a break. Let’s give it up envy for good.