Aspirations for the Living Earth (Article I)
Approximate Read Time:
2 Mins
Based on an article by Rebecca Solnit in the Guardian
So much is happening to the world that is both wonderful and terrible – and it matters how we see it. We can’t simply erase the bad news, yet to ignore the good is the route to indifference or despair
This is as true of climate chaos as anything else. We are hemmed in by stories that prevent us from seeing, or believing in, or acting on the possibilities for change. Some are habits of mind, some are industry propaganda. Sometimes, the situation has changed but the stories haven’t, and people follow the old versions, like outdated maps, into dead ends. We need to leave the age of fossil fuel behind, swiftly and decisively. But what drives our ways of doing things won’t change until we change what drives our ideas.
In order to do what the climate crisis demands of us, we have to find stories of a liveable future, stories of popular power, stories that motivate people to do what it takes to make the human world a better place in which to live. Perhaps we also need to become better aware of how things are, better listeners, more careful about what we take in and from who’s telling it, and what we believe and repeat, because stories can give power – or they can take it away.
To change our thinking about the Living Earth– to end an era of profligate consumption by the few that has consequences for the many – means changing how we think about pretty much everything: wealth, power, joy, time, space, nature, value, what constitutes a good life, what matters, how change itself happens.
As the climate journalist Mary Heglar writes: “We are not short on innovation. “We’ve got loads of ideas for solar panels and micro-grids.” While we have all of these pieces, we don’t have a full picture yet of how we can build an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on Earth . Up to now the climate debate has been limited to scientists and policy experts. While we need their skills, we also need many more practical ideas and positive action.
Global warming has been a story that fell on mostly indifferent ears when it was first discussed in the mainstream media around 50 years ago. Even 20 years ago, it was supposed to be happening very slowly and in the distant future. There were a lot of references to “our grandchildren’s time”. It was a problem that was difficult to grasp – this dispersed, incremental, atmospheric, invisible, global problem with many causes and manifestations being expressed by the general public.
The voices from the various climate movements have finally succeeded in making many, many more people across the world understand it, and many care passionately about what is happening to the Living Earth. This might be the biggest single victory the climate movements have so far achieved. Because once you’ve won the popular imagination, you’ve changed the game and its possible outcomes. But this was a long, slow, arduous process, and misconceptions still abound.
Aspirations for the Living Earth (Article 2)
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
The purpose of ‘Protecting the Living Earth’ website is to encourage people to become more aware and concerned about the well-being of the natural world and the sustainability of human kind.
Outright climate denial – the old story that climate change isn’t real – has been rendered largely obsolete (outside social media that is) by climate-driven catastrophes around the globe and by the good work by climate scientists, activists and writers etc. Meanwhile, the schemes created by fossil fuel corporations to portray themselves as on the environment’s side while they continue their profitable destruction of the Living Earth continues.
Fortunately, as the climate movement has diversified, some organisations such as Clean Creatives, focuses specifically on pressuring advertising and PR agencies to stop doing the fossil-fuel industry’s work. Likewise, climate journalists are exposing how fossil fuel money is funding pseudo-environmental opposition to offshore wind turbines.
If you’re concerned about mining on indigenous land, about local impacts or labour conditions, look the biggest mining operations ever undertaken: for oil, gas, and coal, and the hungry machines that must constantly consume them.
Extracting material that will be used creates the incessant cycle of consumption on which the fossil fuel industry has grown fabulously rich. It creates climate chaos as well as destruction and contamination at every stage of the process. Globally, using fossil fuels kills millions of people annually a death toll larger than any recent war. But that death toll is largely invisible for lack of compelling stories about it.
All mining needs to be done with respect for the environment and people in the vicinity, but the impact of mining for renewables needs to be weighed against the far more devastating impact of mining for and use of fossil fuels and other natural resources. The race is on to find battery materials that are more commonly available and less impactful than lithium and cobalt, and some of the results look promising.
One story frequently encountered frames the possibilities in absolutes: if we can’t win everything, then we lose everything. There are so many doom-soaked stories out there about how civilisation, humanity and even life itself, are scheduled to die out. This apocalyptic thinking is due to another narrative failure: the inability to imagine a world different than the one we currently inhabit.
People without much sense of history imagine the world as static. They assume that if the present order is failing, the system is collapsing, and there is no alternative. A historical imagination equips you to understand that change is ceaseless. You only have to look to the past to see such a world, dramatically different half a century ago, stunningly so a century ago. Not to mention the world of 10,000 ago.
The UK, for example, ran almost entirely on coal power until the 1960s, and if you had said then that it would have to quit coal, many would have imagined this meant an utter collapse of the energy system, not to mention its transformation. Even in 2008, the organisation Carbon Brief noted, “four-fifths of the UK’s electricity came from fossil fuels. Since then, the UK has cleaned up its electricity mix faster than any other major world economy. Coal-fired power has virtually disappeared and even gas use is down by a quarter, instead, the country now gets more than half of its electricity from low-carbon sources, such as solar, wind and nuclear.” Scotland already generates nearly all the electricity it needs from renewables.
While we often hear people casually assert that our world is doomed, no reputable scientist makes such claims. Most are deeply worried, but far from hopeless. Efforts sufficient to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lower temperatures and reverse some aspects of climate breakdown.
A climate story we urgently need is one that exposes who is actually responsible for climate chaos. It’s been popular to say that we are all responsible, but Oxfam reports that over the past 25 years, the carbon impact of the top 1% of the wealthiest human beings was twice that of the bottom 50%, so responsibility for the impact and the capacity to make change is currently distributed very unevenly.
By saying “we are all responsible”, we avoid the fact that the global majority of us don’t need to change much, but a minority needs to change a lot. This is also a reminder that the idea that we need to renounce our luxuries and live more simply doesn’t really apply to the majority of human beings outside what we could perhaps call the overdeveloped world. What is true of Beverly Hills is not true of the majority of people from Bangladesh to Bolivia.
When it comes down to who’s harming the climate, it’s also been popular to focus on individual contributions. The fossil fuel industry likes the narrative of personal responsibility as a way to keep us scrutinising ourselves and one another, rather than them. They’ve promoted the concept of climate footprints as a way to keep the focus on us and not them, and it’s worked. Usually when people are asked what they’re doing about the climate emergency, most will talk about what they’re not consuming or doing – but these will never add up to the speed and scale of change needed to change the present global wasteful systems.
One of the goals of system change is to supersede individual choice. Just as you no longer can opt in to buying a car without seatbelts, or ask for the no-smoking section on the train or restaurant etc. The use of clean energy will have happened because of the collective action that takes shape as positive policy and regulation are adopted.
Aspirations for the Living Earth (Article 3)
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
Last year the veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben pointed out that if you have savings account in one of the many banks funding fossil fuels you may well be helping to damage the world’s environment. Our greatest power lies in our roles as citizens, not consumers, when we can band together to collectively change how the human world works.
Various campaigns around the world have focused on fossil finance, with significant successes, and much more to achieve ahead. The climate movement has become far more sophisticated and precise in its targets in recent years. It’s doing much positive work; it just needs enough people and resources behind it to be more powerful than much of the present status quo.
The skills of so-called superheroes are often solidarity, strategy, persistence and the ability to inspire hope in others. However, the rescuers we need to protect the Living Earth are mostly not individuals but collectives – movements, coalitions, campaigns, civil society. Within those groups there may be someone with an exceptional gift for motivating others but even the world’s greatest conductor needs an orchestra. One person cannot do much whereas a movement can achieve a lot.
Another idea we can get from our films, fictions and popular media is the expectation of a single solution and a clear resolution to our problems and the trouble is over. The climate crisis does not fit easily into this format. Ceasing to use fossil fuel is central, but there is no single solution. Protecting carbon-sequestering peat bogs, forests and grasslands also matters; so does transforming high-impact materials such as cement. Meanwhile, implementing better design for buildings, transport and cities, and addressing soil conservation, farming and food production and consumption all need to be addressed. There are milestones and important goals, but the familiar Hollywood ending – crossing the finish line to wrap up the story – doesn’t describe the reality of the Living Earth.
Change often functions more like a relay race, with new protagonists picking up where the last left off. Such relay races have long been how human rights campaigns work: a positive protest, campaign, or even piece of legislation can introduce new ideas that do their own work in the world at large. Even failed campaigns may succeed in opening the path for later change. The Green New Deal did not pass in the US Senate, but it became a template for the Biden administration’s climate legislation, and shifted the conversation about what is possible. It led the way to the biggest climate bill the US has ever passed. Opponents of environmental action often say it is killing jobs; the Green New Deal did a lot to change that story by portraying climate action as a job creator.
Recognising the reality of global warming also means recognising the interconnectedness of all things. That connection brings with it the obligation: to respect nature, to build domestic regulation and international treaties that protect what’s needed, that is to limit the freedom of the individual in the name of the wellbeing of the Living Earth. This is, of course in direct contrast with free-market fundamentalism and libertarianism. Even the facts of climate science are ideologically offensive to people committed to individual freedom without accountability, let alone the demands created by treaties and regulations.
Responsibility and obligation are challenging words in mainstream culture, so perhaps there will be other stories that recognise this process in which we give back, in gratitude and respect for all that the Living Earth does for us. Even short of that, we can recognise our self-interest in maintaining the system on which life depends.
If news is the daily report on what’s really happening in the world, we need a way of pulling back from individual events, to see the wider context of how things happen. If you only tell short-term stories, it all becomes a kind of meaningless isolated events. Martin Luther King Jr said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We’ve seen it bend in a lot of ways in recent years, both toward and away from justice, but it takes time just to see it bend at all. You need benchmarks, or memories of how things used to be in order to see both social and environmental change.
The South Pacific climate activist and poet Julian Aguon recently declared that Indigenous Peoples “have a unique capacity to resist despair through connection to collective memory. Indeed this just might be our best hope to build a new world rooted in reciprocity and mutual respect – for the Earth and for each other”. That emphasis on collective memory suggests that a strong sense of the past allows for a strong sense of the future, that remembering difficulty and transformation equips us to deal with an unpredictable future.
Aspirations for the Living Earth (Article 4)
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
Some twenty years ago we did not have constructive ways to fully leave the age of fossil fuel behind. Now we do. And the solutions keep getting better. In 2021, the organisation Carbon Tracker put out a report that showed current technology could produce 100 times as much electricity from solar and wind etc., than present current global demand. The report concludes: “The technical and economic barriers have been crossed and the only impediment to change is political.” At the end of the last millennium, those barriers seemed insurmountable. The change is happening, but is often simply too slow to be visible to most.
The Report continues: “At the current 15-20% growth rate of solar and wind, fossil fuels will be pushed out of the electricity sector by the mid-2030s and out of total energy supply by 2050. The unlocking of energy reserves 100 times our current demand creates new possibilities for cheaper energy and more local jobs in a more equitable world, with far less environmental stress.”
We tend to think utopias are unbelievable, but this is a sober-minded think-tank focused on climate and energy politics. The Report made little impact on the general public. Because the energy revolution has been incremental, there’s been no single breakthrough moment. Yet it adds up to an encouraging, and even astonishing narrative.
On the other hand, people find grim narratives all too believable, whether or not they are grounded in fact. We are still inundated by harmful, as well as untrue, stories about climate and the future. Prophecies can be self-fulfilling: if you insist that we cannot possibly win, you set yourself against the possibility of success and the people trying to achieve it.
There’s yet another narrative that’s persisted at least since the invention of compact fluorescent lightbulbs and the internet etc., and that is we must renounce abundance and enter an age of austerity. It’s all in the telling. To consider our age an age of abundance, you have to be counting sheer accumulated stuff and ignoring how it is distributed. That is, we live in an age of extreme wealth for some, and desperation for the many. But there’s another way to count wealth and abundance. That is as hope for the future, safety and public confidence, emotional wellbeing, love and friendship and strong social networks, meaningful work and purposeful lives, equality and justice and inclusion for all.
Early on, we heard that renewables were very expensive – this was part of the austerity narrative, or an excuse for not making the necessary transition. But improvements in design and economies of scale are among the factors making green energy the least expensive form of electricity almost everywhere on Earth. There’s no reason to think the innovations of design and economic improvements are all behind us. Indeed, they are our future.
Engineer and energy expert Saul Griffith recently wrote: “Most people believe a clean-energy future will require everyone to make do with less, but it actually means we can have a better and more sustainable future.” The old story was that we couldn’t afford to do what the climate emergency required. The new one is that it would not only be ecologically devastating, but more expensive not to.
Renewables are on the way to being about less expensive and less pollution than fossil fuel; in many places across the world they already are. Over their lifetime, electric cars work out to be cheaper than internal combustion cars because charging and maintaining them is cheaper. Again there are the indirect and negative effects of the use of fossil fuels on human health and the natural world.
A lot of people tend to measure climate action in terms of huge national or international news events, but the change that matters is often happening at local and regional and other levels. A university divests its investments from fossil-fuel industries; a state sets a date for ending the sale of new petrol cars; a city passes a measure mandating all-electric new buildings; ground is broken on a major solar installation; a state or country sets a new record for percentage of wind power in its energy mix; a pipeline or gas terminal or drilling site gets cancelled; a carbon-sequestering forest or peat bog gets protected status; a coal plant closes.
This does not erase all the bad news, about continuing breakdown of natural systems and its toll on human lives and impact on the Living Earth, but it does contextualise them as crises we can respond to if we choose to. So much is happening, both wonderful and terrible, and it adds up to more stories than almost anyone can take in. But the overarching frameworks in which we receive them matter, and so do the critical skills to recognise, choose, and change stories.
The climate crisis is a problem with no single solution, but many solutions, just as there is no single way to protect the Living Earth, but many
The writer of prophetic science-fiction Octavia Butler included this passage in one of her essays:
“OK,” the young man challenged. “So what’s the answer?”
“There isn’t one,” I told him.
“No answer? You mean we’re just doomed?” He smiled as though he thought this might be a joke.
“No,” I said. “I mean there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
This is an edited version of a speech given at Princeton University in November 2022
Aspirations for the Living Earth (Article 5)
Approximate Read Time:
3 Mins
We have the technologies, policies, and initiatives to move us toward a fair and sustainable future. All that’s missing is the commitment and the collective will to change direction in positive ways. The hope is that the issues of social fairness, biodiversity, global warming, land and ocean degradation along with the understanding and exercise of leadership be addressed.
Today humanity is challenged by an environmental, ecological and biological emergency, not forgetting possible nuclear destruction. However, we must not despair but be hopeful in that we still have a window of opportunity to do something about it before it is too late. Together we must sketch out possible future scenarios that may well vary, depending that is on the decisions taken now by governments, businesses and individuals across the world. The next few years will prove highly crucial in relation to the Living Earth and thus to humanity. Together we must offer a problem-solving philosophy designed to guide practical action leading to the attainment of an. environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on Earth.
The hope is that we are moving away from the paradigm that remains aligned with the dominator version of tyranny, of authoritarianism and regressive belief systems to one aligned to a partnership ideal of democracy and progressive spirituality. The fossil-fuel industry is no longer a match for renewable energy production, with renewables now overtaking the largest oil industry company, Exxon, on stock markets. There is hope, but it will be the unstinting efforts of most of us all that will continue to make advances across the globe.
We have reasons for hope, and indeed signs of this great transformation of hope can be seen across much of the world, a hope that is more than simply being optimistic, but is the cause for necessary and positive action. The new paradigm of hope gives us a new sense of personal responsibility to do what we can to make the 21st century a better place for us all rather than what is currently happening to the Living Earth as a direct result of irresponsibility human actions. If there is any possibility of avoiding human extinction our best hope is that people, irrespective of background, education, gender, culture, religion, status etc., meet and share understandings relating to our place, responsibilities and meaning in the world.
Our task is to find empowering ways of relating to, and integrating what may be seen as abstract, disconnected or overwhelming information, to seeing that a new and positive future is indeed possible for humanity and the Living Earth. Each of us has a critical role to play in bringing such a future about. The aim is to allow ourselves to be empowered and supported in whatever you chose as an individual and, importantly, working together in positive ways with others.
The question for this generation is whether we are entering a world that is fair and just, spiritually fulfilling and sustainable, or a world that is empty of beauty and life? In many ways the answer belongs to all of us. How will we answer this and future generations if we don’t do everything quickly and with determination to preserve the basis of life on Earth now, and instead simply continue as before?
It is essential and vital to hold on to a large degree of optimism in today’s challenging age. It opens doors, and pathways, and new opportunities. Optimism results from looking at the circumstances, and our capacity and commitment to transforming those circumstances where and when, necessary. We too often get caught up in our unconscious, unexamined assumptions as a result of our resignation, disappointment and discouragement, and when we do get caught up in these unconscious, unexamined assumptions, we cannot see the reality of improved possibilities, and meaningful lives anymore.
In the midst of so much ecological destruction we must not lose hope in light of the support that life-enhancing movements across the world are being offered by people working together to restore a healthy Living Earth.
It seems that, in general, humanity is somewhat lost in that it cannot agree on what we are meant to be doing here. We lack a worldview that reflects our place and purpose in the Universe. However, with the help of science and a degree of wisdom and understanding the emergence of the new evolutionary worldview is beginning to lift us out of ignorance and danger.
It could be said that when we show empathy and compassion to each other, there is no burden too heavy for us to carry together. Again, it is in acknowledging together the Living Earth’s injuries that necessary change happens. It’s in the sharing our grief with the Living Earth and our fellow humans, seeing it together and not looking away, that the heartbreak turns to hope.
Jeremy Lent in his work ‘Patterns of Meaning’ talks about integrating science and traditional wisdom in order to find our place in the universe. In recent decades conservation efforts have led to a number of species being saved from extinction as a sign of hope. Sadly, many of the world’s species remain in danger of extinction. Nevertheless, hidden behind these conservations efforts there is important progress, and that tells us that if we put the right policies in place, they can work.