Earth Day Thoughts

Enjoying the world as a magic show

Don Quixote and Cassandra, instantly assembled from digital bits

Today is the 54th Earth Day since we started commemorating them back in 1970, near the dawn of the modern environmental movement.  It would be wonderful if we could look back at the last 54 years with pride in our accomplishments: How we learned to take care of the planet, reduce pollution, transition to renewables, limit consumption, restore forests and wetlands.

But, sadly, we can’t.

Alas, while we can point to a few major accomplishments (like reducing use of ozone-depleting chemicals before we scorched ourselves) over the last four decades, the reality is we did not do what we needed to do. Instead, we now confront an extremely dire situation. We still lack the political will and leadership to even try to avert the cataclysm — the catastrophe that is already here, with us now, and the far worse one that is coming at us.

I wish I could say I know what to do at this point. For many years I saw the need for a social — civil society — movement that would break the consensus trance and eerie dissociation that marks our relationship to the overwhelming hyperobject that is the ecological crisis. I tried to build one of my own (The Evolver Network) and contributed to a few others (Occupy Wall Street, Extinction Rebellion) in the ways that felt best to me at the time. I am still trying — as with our new seminar, Embracing Our Emergency, starting Sunday. I hope you will join us.

None of the past movements developed the kind of momentum needed to interrupt or even slow down the forces of destruction. Now it almost seems too late. However, we live in a universe of mysterious quantum potential where anything could happen at any moment, so there is no need to give up hope.

As I have thought about it over the years, my problem with a lot of activism is that it makes little sense to keep pointing angry fingers of blame at the fossil fuel companies, the car companies, Amazon, and so on. What is that old saying: When you point one finger out, don’t forget you point the other four fingers back at yourself? That is the problem here: We are all inextricably meshed into this planet-annihilating system, which provides us with short-term comforts, salaries, exotic travel opportunities, and the endless deluge of commodities we all use every day.

It is quite true that the average person today has more access to all kinds of luxuries (which we now see as necessities) than an Italian Renaissance prince of the 15th Century could imagine: Any music, film, or book instantly available (for a price). Edible delicacies from across the Earth. Running water and flush toilets. Medicines (if you can afford them). And so on. It is also true that we’ve passed the maximum limit of resource use, where access to these “necessary luxuries” will start to decline for many.

All of this is due to one reason: The extraordinary bequest of nonrenewable fossil fuels, particularly oil which we learned how to extract in the 19th Century. This discovery allowed us to develop this globe-spanning industrial civilization on an exponential growth curve. One barrel of oil provides the equivalent of 10,000 hours of human labor. Since we figured this out, we’ve been extracting and burning up what Thomas Hartmann calls “the last hours of ancient sunlight” at an incredible rate.

The merging of mercantilism, consumer Capitalism, and industrial technology led to an unbelievably rapid, explosive growth of the human population. In the late 19th Century, European scientists feared we would soon run out of natural fertilizer and the population would crash. Luckily, scientists figured out how to make artificial fertilizers using fossil fuel inputs. This allowed the population to skyrocket. Without this oil-boosted fertilizer, it is estimated that populations would fall back to one billion or less.

When I was born in 1966, there were two billion people alive on Earth. Today, we approach nine billion — an exponential rate of growth. Even so, we know the main driver of ecological decimation is not the masses of people living at subsistence levels, but the wealthy elites who consume most of the resources.

Over the last centuries, we meshed the world together via brutal imperial conquests, trade routes, and then communications networks. This all happened so quickly that we barely think about it. In any event, we are part of it: Our identities and subjectivities — our sense of what’s possible — are entirely shaped by these extraordinary circumstances, which, for us, constitute a natural ambience. We usually don’t think about our technological environment or the “Technosphere” which surrounds us at all times, just as fish swim in the water without questioning it.

In my work, I proposed we can conceive of this rapid planetary transformation we’ve unleashed as a “natural” geo-cosmic event in the history of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe as a whole. It seems to be happening through us, outside of our conscious control, will, or intention. It does feel like we are instruments/slaves of the technology we are driven to unleash, rather than masters of it. One also senses that Artificial Intelligence could be the culmination of what we have been driving toward for centuries as we applied a narrow construct of rationality that devalues any subjective aspects of experience that cannot be quantified or calculated.

Of course, we can point to many inflection points that caused the system accelerate or change course. But these inflections also seem inevitable, when we look at them from a meta-perspective. As an example, the tendency of Capitalism to funnel resources to a smaller and smaller elite, which amplifies wealth inequality over time. Or the way corporations metastasized into gigantic “egregores,” maximizing profit despite their toll on the integrity of communities and ecosystems. Or how debt supplanted military force as an instrument of control, used against developing countries and working people in the US and elsewhere.

The system runs according to a powerful internal logic. Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to intervene, to redirect it. I like to believe we can still do so. We will be forced to do so, eventually. I can only imagine this happening properly when a critical mass of people reach a systems-level perspective. If anything, this seems more difficult today, given current circumstances such as fractured attention spans and a culture that prioritizes entrepreneurial success and self-optimization. I hope we will keep doing the difficult work to reach an encompassing systemic perspective: This is not something our society values.

Not only that, I believe this systemic analysis of what’s happening to us and through us needs to be accompanied by a shift from materialism / physicalism to analytic or monistic idealism: The understanding, based on logic and science, that consciousness, not matter, is the foundational reality itself.  Only this paradigm shift has the possibility, I suspect, of changing the deep structures and cognitive biases underpinning late-stage Capitalism, or what Yanis Varoufakis now calls “Technofeudalism.” The ontology needs to be changed, I suspect, before we can develop new, healthier political and economic systems.

My theory is that we race toward a precipice of evolutionary bifurcation: An inescapable transmutation / metamorphosis. It may be the physical end of our species in this Earth cycle — I hope not, but even that wouldn’t mean, I believe, the end of everything. As a follower of occult philosophers like Gurdjieff and Rudolf Steiner (also due to many psychedelic experiences on substances like DMT), I envision humanity, as a whole, to be a kind of inter-twangled “soul-family”: Whatever happens here, we will continue on, through other levels or subtler dimensions and future world-incarnations, until we have fulfilled our purpose or mission, according to what the universe (or the “spiritual hierarchies”) needs from us.

Linear time is an illusion, based on our limited viewpoint from within this particular construct. On some level, what was always meant to happen has already occurred: We intuit this, also.

From this occult/systems vantage point, the ecological crisis reveals a silver lining: We have this sliver of time — this liminal threshold — given to us as an opportunity for initiatory breakthroughs, individually as well as collectively. Today, most people either passively avoid or actively dissociate from the ecological meta- or poly-crisis. I sympathize! But, by doing so, we not only shirk our responsibility but we fail to make use of the fantastic opportunity (I mean this seriously) the Earth has offered us.