I invite comment and dialogue on this topic, starting with comments from John Roshek and me.

Molly

http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=88636

Posted on APRIL 18, 2007:

THIS ISLAND EARTH
As ecological anxiety increases, the search for radical solutions begins

By Marc Maximov

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire A film by Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson

After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination by Kirkpatrick Sale Duke University Press, 200 pp.

Hope, Human and Wild: Three Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth by Bill McKibben, with a new afterword Milkweed Editions, 232 pp.

[image-1]On a freezing night last November, a crush of concerned citizens packed into the General Store Café in Pittsboro for a special screening by Chatham County documentarians Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, a bleak, relentless, ecological horror film, played to a rapt house. While most Americans shrug off global warming as somebody else's problem, at this film's conclusion the viewers sat in a circle to discuss the inconvenient truths it raised. If Bennett and Erickson were recruiting fellow foot soldiers in the battle for our planet's future, we were a Coalition of the Willing. But after the show the practical obstacles to saving the planet were all too clear: We all strapped ourselves to thousands of pounds of steel, fired up noxious internal combustion engines, and drove off into the night.

Judging solely by the increased media attention, people are finally starting to confront the implications of a damaged planet (global warming was even the cover story of the March 12 issue of Sports Illustrated). On Feb. 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its most strongly worded warning to date, telling us that it is now a near certainty that human activity is responsible for the rise in world temperatures.

The greater American populace is ready to respond to the panel's increasingly dire warnings the same way it's responded in the past—by doing absolutely nothing—and with few exceptions, our brave leaders are also poised to spring into inaction. For those who actually care about the plight of the natural world, the film screening in Pittsboro, with its disjunction between good intentions and effective action, illustrates the staggering odds stacked against any chance of meaningful change in our society's consumption patterns.

Even if our hearts and minds are in the right place, it's our bodies, what with all the eating and schlepping around, that are taking us, environmentally speaking, to the other place (16 percent more efficiently in a Toyota Prius!). Since practical solutions at a scale that would effect real change are almost impossible to imagine, much recent environmental thought has focused on simply diagnosing the problem.

The well of anxiety tapped in What a Way to Go is finding many outlets, including Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and in new books. One such tome is Kirkpatrick Sale's After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, in which he examines the archaeological record in search of the pivotal events that sent us on our destructive path. Earlier philosophers have cited the rise of civilization as the crucial moment, and, indeed, civilization is a prime culprit, with its established pattern of turning harmless bands of wandering apes into plunderous, continent-spanning ant colonies. Surprisingly, Sale places the turning point 60,000 years earlier, while people were still hunting and gathering for their supper. In the popular imagination, "hunter-gatherer" is a catch-all term for pre-civilized peoples, whose ostensibly diverse modes of living are fundamentally alike; by contrasting late-period homo sapiens with its ancestor homo erectus, Sale argues that one hunter-gatherer is not like another.

Sale's story begins 70,000 years ago, with the eruption of Mount Toba, a huge volcano on the island of Sumatra. Notable eruptions of the last few centuries, like Mount St. Helens, Pinatubo, Krakatoa and Tambora, were all puny compared to the apocalyptic Toba event. The invention of writing was still many millennia in the future, so we can only imagine the eruption's terrifying effect on the people who lived through it, people whose anatomy and intelligence were identical to our own. Temperatures plunged and the Earth fell into a persistent volcanic winter, decimating animal and plant populations around the world. Most of our ancestors are thought to have perished. The survivors were forced to find new sources of food.

Where before people had hunted and trapped small game and scavenged for lions' leftovers, excavations from this period show dramatic improvements in weaponry and a change in the animals brought home for dinner. Capable now of bringing down fearsome big game like rhinos, elephants and the giant cape buffalo, this was the moment, according to Sale, when man first imagined himself atop the natural order, separate from and superior to his fellow creatures. Large mammals, their populations already devastated by the Toba event, had a new enemy to contend with, a superpredator. The Sixth Extinction was underway.

Sale, a historian and self-described neo-Luddite, author of a dozen books on a variety of subjects, is careful to point out in the preface that he's not a scientist. He relies on the latest findings of archaeologists and anthropologists, but his assertions are broader and more speculative. His central point is that the prehistoric "advances" celebrated in the first chapters of history textbooks were not inevitable steps on the road to greatness; rather, they were crisis responses to environmental pressures, each one a lamentable stumble in a long decline. Along with big-game hunting and agriculture, Sale disparages the taming of fire (which enabled "farming with fire," and the ability to rapidly affect ecosystems on a large scale); cave art (those lyrical images at Lascaux and Altamira were actually sinister signs of dissociative magic); even language (symbolic thinking led to the distinction between "self" and "other," which validated conquest and social inequity).

Sale's most speculative hypothesis concerns early human psychology. Prehistoric "advances" undermined the mental health of our ancestors, he argues, by alienating them from their life-giving habitat, leaving their descendents with a psyche that's "delusional, and can be maintained only by tortuous ideas of self-importance and wrathful practices of self-enhancement." Our only hope of redemption is a return to the Eden of the title, which refers to the long, peaceful reign of sapiens' immediate forebear, homo erectus. In its 1.5-million-year stretch on Earth, eight times longer than our own, erectus lived in harmony with its fellow creatures. Our survival, according to Sale, depends upon recapturing the primal erectus consciousness we still possess.

While After Eden is a thought-provoking attempt to understand the rapacity that is now so clearly characteristic of homo sapiens, too much of its argument consists simply of turning traditional notions of progress on their heads; progress becomes regress, triumph is recast as failure. It's a reductive, dogmatic primitivism: In vilifying beautiful cave paintings, and in assessing the mental health of Cro-Magnons, Sale makes his ideology do some heavy lifting. Finally, his solution to the present ecological conundrum, a return to the erectus mindset, is an appealing idea, but he admits that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't all run off and become erectus-style hunter-gatherers. It's hard to visualize practical next steps to take to reclaim our erectus mentality.

Like After Eden, What a Way to Go! builds its argument from a survey of experts. Alternately personal and political, Bennett intersperses his family's home movies, campy stock footage and interviews with friends and family with comments from an assortment of authors, scientists, visionaries and cultural critics he and Erickson met when they circled the country by train in the fall of 2005.

Their choice of conveyance was apt, as the film's most memorable image is an extended metaphor that likens our civilization, on its inexorable, self-destructive hurtle, to a runaway train. We're riding to our doom on the rails of peak oil, climate change, mass extinction and population overshoot. The engine is the collection of cultural myths that perpetuate a way of life that's profoundly out of balance. So far the ride has been smooth enough to lull most of the passengers to sleep. It's the dark tunnel ahead that has the filmmakers worried.

Bennett and Erickson certainly did their research. No fewer than 20 experts populate the film, including anarcho-primitivist authors Daniel Quinn (Ishmael) and Derrick Jensen, local environmental scientists like Duke's William Schlesinger and Stuart Pimm and UNC-Chapel Hill's Douglas Crawford-Brown, and other eco-luminaries like Richard Heinberg, Jerry Mander, Richard Manning, Chellis Glendinning and Thomas Berry. With so many experts speaking on so many subjects, the filmmakers decided to organize the film with title pages of topics and subtopics, which gives it the flavor of a PowerPoint presentation. Those already up on their science and well-versed in the tenets of deep ecology won't find much they haven't heard before; but for the average concerned citizen, it's a broad and comprehensive summary.

Sustaining a single, unvarying note of earnest despair for most of its two-hour running time, the compounded effect of all the bad news begins to feel numbing. But it also builds a powerful momentum as one expert after another distills a great many vital and disturbing issues to their essence. Perhaps, in light of the monumental challenges we face, our first reaction should be despair. As Bennett solemnly intones, "I have read many books about the world situation, and I have noticed a curious thing: the happy chapter.... I don't like happy chapters. They've lulled me back to sleep. They suggest that somebody, somewhere, somehow, is handling it. I can just go on with my life."

For those willing to do the hard work of changing deep-seated cultural habits, there's a crying need for the far-sighted to show the way. One such is Bill McKibben, author of the 1995 book Hope, Human and Wild: Three Stories of Living Lightly on the Earth. (On Wednesday, April 18, McKibben will appear at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. See Calendar Spotlight on page 34.) In that book, which has just been reissued with a new afterword, McKibben describes three examples of what the cover promises: "True stories of living lightly on the Earth."

McKibben's first true story is of his adopted home, the Adirondacks of upstate New York, and the remarkable resurgence of forests and wildlife in the Eastern United States. The area was almost entirely cleared for farmland in the early centuries of American settlement, but now, with the farmers long gone westward, the woodlands are returning, at a rate of a million acres a decade (an area larger than Rhode Island) in New York State alone. McKibben's two other real-life cases are about a pair of peculiar Third-World locales: the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Indian province of Kerala.

In Curitiba, a series of chance events in the early 1970s resulted in the appointment of 33-year-old Jaime Lerner as mayor. Lerner is an architect and planner whose rare combination of idealism and pragmatism made him one of the most effective and visionary mayors in the world. Under his watch, though Curitiba's population soared like those of Brazil's other large cities, newcomers were better integrated than in the endless, filthy slums of Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, and the city remained pleasant and livable. The transportation system is one reason for this, and it's the city's most notable success. With an efficient network of dedicated express lanes for buses, some of which carry up to 300 passengers, the Curitiban system is essentially an above-ground subway, at one-hundredth the cost; as a result, citizens of Curitiba use significantly less fuel than the average Brazilian, even though they're more likely to own cars.

Kerala is another example of people doing more with less. Its per capita income is one-seventieth that of the United States, typical for India; yet its life expectancy, literacy levels and low birth rates are equivalent to America's, far better than the rest of the nation. The people are well-educated and healthy, and they take an active part in the political life of the state. While in many respects Kerala's impressive statistics are an aberration in the Third World, McKibben is quick to point out that Kerala, like Curitiba, is no utopia: Unemployment is high and the economy is stagnant. What it is, most importantly for Americans, is a counterargument to the pervasive idea that a high level of consumption is necessary for a high quality of life.

In the new afterword to the 2007 edition of Hope, McKibben relates continued positive developments in Curitiba and Kerala (the news from the Adirondacks is mixed); even more promising, some of their innovations have spread to other parts of the developing world. Ideally, we in America could learn from their examples as well. "The lesson," he writes, "is that some of our fears about simpler living are unjustified. It is not a choice between suburban America and dying at thirty-five, between Wal-Mart and hunger.... The average American income is seventy times the average Keralite one—there is some latitude for change."

The question of whether we humans have damaged our habitat has been definitively settled. Now the question is whether we have the will to change. Can we eat more sustainably and locally? Can we plan our cities on a human scale? Can we do without so much stuff? For the first time in human history, we have proof that the local insults we've perpetrated on the natural world have accrued to a global ledger, with unknown consequences for the planet and every living thing on it. Each generation likes to think it occupies a special place in history. The 6.5 billion souls currently drawing breath may have the strongest claim yet.

For information on What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, visit www.whatawaytogomovie.com.

As I watched the story of global climate change unfold in Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” something happened inside; an inner shift took place. I could no longer regard “global climate change” as a threat, as something we needed to work to prevent. I saw that it is already upon us, and has been upon us for the last five or ten years.
The conditions for the changes have been building up over the last hundred or hundred and fifty years, but we might have been able to avert their cumulative effects if we had acted twenty years ago. But most of us in the United States and Canada didn’t. In fact, we made things worse. We continued to use petroleum at ever increasing rates, as if there were no tomorrow. And now tomorrow has come.

Brown-outs and black-outs are already becoming commonplace in large metropolitan areas in the record-breaking heat of this summer. Hurricanes and storms are getting stronger and more frequent. If we look at the evidence, we have to realize that these occurrences are not
going to go away in a few years. These are not simply temporary phenomena that will cycle back to “normal” in a few months or even years. There is no “normal” in a time of global climate change.

I feel like I imagine a person might feel receiving a serious cancer diagnosis, when it is clear that he or she may not get well. Only it’s the whole human race that has received this diagnosis, along with many other species, large and small. Yes, it is possible to mitigate some of the effects by making significant changes in our energy use and our relationship to one another and the environment. But our efforts may be too little, too late. We may die prematurely, anyway.

And just like many cancer patients who cannot or will not change their diet or other habits, we may not make the changes needed. It’s not up to an individual cancer patient this time, yet it is only by millions of people making individual changes that we might be able to improve our situation. If I reduce my energy use (and waste) significantly, while all my neighbors continue in their old habits, my efforts will have little effect on the outcome. On the other hand, if we all think that is the case and don’t make individual changes, guess what? We are all doomed!

I see my comfortable lifestyle changing radically, and probably uncomfortably, in the very near future. I find myself contemplating things I use daily around the house, wondering which will soon be unavailable to me, and how I might be able to substitute for them—or do without.

We can do some things to prepare: create gardens and greenhouses to grow more of our own food, dry clothes outside, buy fuel-efficient appliances and cars, make bicycles our primary mode of local transportation (weather permitting), reduce our travel, insulate our homes, turn the thermostat up in the summer, down in the winter, let go of energy intensive toys, and so on.

Beyond all this, however, is a deeper issue: how shall we live now with this life-threatening diagnosis? We can take our medicine, make the recommended changes, but it may not be enough. Many will die; will you or I be among them? If we survive, we will need to cope with enormous losses—of family and friends, of familiar habits and routines, of jobs and economic security, and who knows what more. Huge and unpredictable emotional and spiritual challenges lie ahead. How shall we prepare for them?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to that question, but I do think we will need to keep asking it, and similar questions, as we make our way through the unknown territory ahead.

One response I find right now is in appreciating what I now have, while I have it. Many of us live in such abundance and comfort. Rather than living in fear of losing it, I want to fully enjoy it now, perhaps even more keenly knowing it may not last. Rilke asks God, “Just give me a little more time!/ I want to love the things/as no one has thought to love them/until they’re real and ripe and worthy of you” (Rilke’s Book of Hours, Macy/Barrows translation).

Buddhism teaches about impermanence, how everything arises and passes away and nothing ever remains the same. We all grow old and eventually die. Not only do little things arise and pass away, but also entire civilizations, whole cultures and economic systems. In the normal course of daily life, it is easy to forget this stark fact, or to think of it only theoretically. Global climate change and peak oil may bring home the fact of impermanence to us in a new way, remind us of the preciousness of human life, and call us to practice acceptance, equanimity, and compassion at new depths.

I believe that the changes that lie ahead will call upon each of us to serve one another and our communities in ways we may never have thought possible. I am convinced that such service will prove to be the most fulfilling experience many of us will ever have had in our lives. It may not be “fun,” but it will be meaningful and rewarding to our souls. Many of the opportunities for service will come along unexpectedly, which means we will often need to respond in the moment. We will be called to serve in our neighborhoods, on the street, in our work places—not just when doing designated “volunteer work.”

A client of mine who lives in Sweden recently spoke of making herself “available” in a new way, available “to do the work of the heart.” She has been working with Swedish survivors of the 2004 tsunami through the Red Cross, and was recently asked to meet a flight of refugees from the bombing of Lebanon. At first she thought it was a waste of time, because all she did was give people directions in the airport; anyone could have done that. However, as the crowd thinned down, someone asked her to speak with a man who appeared to be in shock. After sitting with him for a while, she figured out what he needed and found others to bring him food, coffee, and a wheelchair. More importantly, she provided him with a sympathetic ear so he could tell his story of living through three traumatic days of war. Amazingly, by the time they parted, they were laughing and joking together, the man restored to himself. In thanking her, he said he would remember this meeting for the rest of his life.

This story struck me as a model for what may happen to many of us in the years ahead. We may be called upon to listen to and support people going through trauma, strangers as well as friends—and we may never know in advance when we will be needed. At other times, we ourselves may need help, receiving the same kind of support we have given. We are all in this together.

How then can we best make ourselves available to help when needed? I think it is mostly a matter of clearing away inner and outer encumbrances. Outer encumbrances might be commitments that don’t really serve us (or anyone else) anymore: general busyness, a full schedule, a particularly demanding job, volunteer situations that no longer bring us fulfillment, unnecessary house and yard work, or a difficult relationship that takes a lot of time and energy to maintain.

Inner encumbrances, probably more problematic, include beliefs about ourselves and the world, “should’s and ought’s,” fears and self-doubt, addictions, habits, and so on. I suspect they would fall into the three causes of suffering according to Buddha: attachment, aversion, confusion. To release these, we need to work on ourselves through prayer and meditation, counseling or coaching, spiritual and psychological self-help books, spending time in nature, journaling, and so on. Suddenly personal growth doesn’t seem like a self-indulgent luxury, but rather a necessary preparation for the challenges ahead.

This is but one important dimension of our preparation. Another lies in our coming together in community, to provide food, clothing, shelter, energy, and other life necessities for ourselves and our neighbors. We cannot survive alone, individual by individual, family by family. We can only survive by helping each other, bringing our varied skills and gifts to bear, sharing what we have, and planning together to obtain what we collectively need. Community building and economic relocalization need to begin right now. Indeed they are already happening, in many towns. Relocalization groups are forming, creating community gardens, improving public transportation, encouraging bike use, working with local governments to change regulations to support truly local economies. I believe our towns and city neighborhoods can be transformed in the process into more friendly, vibrant, sustainable communities.

In facing global climate change and the effects of declining oil supplies, we truly face the unknown. Scientists and economists can make educated guesses, but in a chaotic system, anything can happen. We could have searing heat and drought in one region, torrential rains and sudden freezes in another. The prevailing world economy could respond gracefully and gradually to declining oil supplies, adapting as needed, or it could remain on its crash course for several more years, suddenly reaching a breaking point and collapsing altogether. We will have to learn to live with impermanence, in the moment, making many different sets of contingency plans, with a readiness to change course on short notice. This is an essentially spiritual stance, because it depends on our trusting ourselves and the larger whole of life to adapt and respond.

Can we let go of our limiting beliefs and expectations about how it’s supposed to be? Can we find a new flexibility and openness to change within ourselves? Can we let go of ego-driven desires and demands, and accept whatever gifts come to us moment to moment? Can we surrender to the flow of life and death, blessing those who survive us, and giving thanks for the life we have had? These are some of the spiritual challenges we face in the early years of the 21st century.

Who knows what our descendents will face 100 years from now? May they be living in a healthy, sustainable world and may we play our parts in creating that world for them. I believe we are up to it!

APPLE-Shasta meeting, Friday, July 14

We have a splendid potluck, with many dishes made out of predominately locally produced foods.  People sat at tables according to their interests for preliminary conversations.

Posters are available from Greg Dinger for publicizing "An Inconvenient Truth" now showing in Mt Shasta at the Coming Attractions Theatre.   He is also seeking donations for a quarter page ad in the Mt Shasta Herald. <gregd@greybearddesign.com>.

Cindy Weiss passed out a questionnaire about how much food people are growing themselves, and how they plan to preserve it.  She  will compile the information for the group as a whole--to form a kind of base line to see how we are changing over time--and post it on the FeedMtShasta.org web site.

Cindy also shared a list she has compiled of North County growers/producers--of vegetables and fruits, grains, beans, and meat.  She will post this information on FeedMtShasta.org.  Information about South County growers can be added to that list. 

Community Garden:  Fred Lewis, Philip York, and John Rosek agreed to coordinate the Community Garden project temporarily.  They will contact the 50 people who signed up at the July 4th booth for a meeting next Friday, July 21, at 3 pm at the Mt Shasta Library.  The group will walk to Sisson School to view the garden there, and then on to Shastice Park to survey that space.  The group needs to put together a specific proposal for the Parks and Rec Board to gain approval. Fred can be reached at 926-4967.

Tim Holt and  others are forming a similar group in Dunsmir.

Energy Inventory:  Todd Cory, Don Nobach, John Roshek, and Angelina Cook have put toether a home energy inventory that all APPLE-ites are encouraged to use to save energy and money at home.  We discussed next steps with that project. 

Rose Taylor suggested a video she has seen called "Kilowatt Ours" that shows how people can save energy at home.  Stacy volunteered to check with Stage Door about a date for showing that, and coordinating that event.  Don will make more copies of the energy inventory for that event.  

Molly wondered if we could set up some kind of visible feedback display, like a thermometer that would measure the electric usage of the community, with a goal of lowering it over time. 

Molly and Jill Gardner are planning to write a series of columns, with the hope of getting them published in the local newspaper.  The first three articles could be on the Home Energy Inventory.  Future columns would include food production, preservation, local sources, etc.

Web site:  Molly asked for help with the web site and the email list.  Don Nobach and Sunny Dinger volunteered.  Molly urged everyone on-line to go to Apple-Shasta.org, which will take you to the Relocalization web site.  If people will set up an account there, we can more easily send e-messages to the whole group.  Moreover, we can use the Forum to discuss ideas and plans outside of meetings.  Michelle asked for a link from the Apple-Shasta web site to MSBEC.   Molly will set that up.

John Roshek will inquire about APPLE having a booth at Farmer's Market to get information out to the community about peak oil, and APPLE projects.  Omanasa offered to help.  Others are needed to sit at the table.  Phone John to help: 926-6298.

Omanasa and John will also contact the city to urge them to proceed with the bike path plan.  Omanasa will draw up a petition for people to sign.  That can be at the Farmer's Market table, too.

We briefly discussed the possibility of setting up a Ride Share bulletin Board on one of our web sites.  Craig's List in Redding has a rideshare feature we could use meanwhile.

Our next meeting will be August 8, 9, or 10, depending on when we can get the use of Eskaton Manor again.  Potluck at 5:30, meeting at 6:30. 

Respectfully submitted,
Molly Brown