The End of the Beginning?

From Mega Drought to Metanoia

My friend Jamie Wheal has been writing a series on the ecological emergency for his newsletter. In his latest piece, he looks at what’s happening with the hydrological cycle — a devastating, terrifying story. He visits a friend living near Austin, Texas who just bought a gorgeous, multi-million-dollar mansion without direct access to well water or municipal water. The house relies on rainfall and, when that fails, commercial trucking of water in from California (convoys of trucks burning fuel, producing more CO2).

Our entire agricultural system draws from aquifers that are depleted and reaching the point of no return. Cities in the South West require electricity for ACs. Much of that electricity comes from hydroelectric power — massive dams built decades ago — which is also threatened by drought. Wheal writes: “If we don’t have water, we can’t grow food. Not a farmer on the planet who would argue otherwise… If we run out of cheap, stable electricity, we can’t condition habitats that are otherwise totally unlivable (not just super uncomfortable). And rapidly getting hotter.”

Over the past decade, I have enjoyed watching Wheal’s evolution from self-optimization / extreme sports aficionado (he coauthored the book Stealing Fire with the industrial-grade techno-optimist Steven Kotler) to sincerely freaked out Cassandra commenting on the cascading meta-crisis. Like me, he is in the relatively unique position of being a generalist author, unattached to any institutional framework or venture fund. From this perspective, the most authentic thing you feel you can do is keep bringing attention back to the ecological Armageddon we confront collectively. But this is a thankless task. It leads, over time, to a good portion of your audience dropping away.

As I explored in How Soon Is Now, I consider the ecological crisis an initiatory passage for the human species as a whole. We will either attain a new level of consciousness as a result of this collective life-or-death crisis, or we will go extinct. At the moment, we are trapped in an adolescent, immature stage of development. To survive, we must to shift from thinking of ourselves as "I" beings to understanding ourselves as "we" beings: Interdependent agents of a biospheric whole.

Instead of operating out of individual self-interest, we can switch to operating, at every moment in our lives, as biospheric agents. We can act out of collective interest — care for our human species, for the local and planetary ecology, as well as care and love for ourselves. This is how truly functional indigenous communities understand themselves — as a unified social organism — and how they relate to their surrounding ecology.