The Future Canceled

Not long ago (Jan. 15, 2015) I wrote a blog I called ‘Climate Depression.’ In that piece, I tried to express the truth as I understood it from the writings of Guy McPherson—i.e. that we are already, because of the CO₂ our industrial civilization has put in the atmosphere, on a path to the extinction of most life we know and value on this planet. Together with what other scientists have been telling us about the accelerating extinction of species, the expanding poisoning of the soil and the oceans, the destruction of rain forests, and other insults to the web of life—the prospects for the future of life on Earth (the only planet we know of with life at all) seem grim indeed. It is for this reason that Joanna Macy in her recent book World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press: 2007), makes this statement:

The loss of certainty that there will be a future is, I believe, the pivotal psychological reality of our time (p 151).

What Macy is saying is that not just her, not just me, not just scientists who measure it on their instruments, not just a few aware people on this planet, but EVERYONE is feeling the same uncertainty, anger, fear, and grief. We are all assaulted by the grim question—will there even be a future?—at every turn. We see the increasing severity of storms (including winter storms, which are only a more subtle form of the same crisis), the steadily increasing global temperatures (2014 was the warmest year, globally, on record), the steady melting of the Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheets and the snows and glaciers in the Andes, the Sierras, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the alarming evidence of methane seeps that could accelerate the whole warming process beyond even our worst fears. We see it, we see reports of it, and we tremble. We grieve. We mourn the loss of a livable planet for our children, our grandchildren, and all those who are scheduled to follow us but who, if the dire predictions prove true, may not follow at all.

            Unlike others, however, Joanna Macy does not stop there. She does not go along with the dominant paradigm which says, ‘just don’t think about it, don’t dwell on it, don’t bring everyone down by giving voice to your fear and your despair and your grief.’ No. What Macy says and promotes in her writings and her workshops is precisely the opposite: do give voice to your grief. Do not be ashamed of feeling what you do, for it is natural, adaptive and even healing to do so. Here is how she puts it:

When we mourn the destruction of our biosphere, it is categorically distinct from grief at the prospect of our own personal death.

            Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level where we open to collective experience. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t apologize if you cry for the burning of the Amazon or the Appalachian mountains stripped open for coal. The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel is a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time. And it is an adaptive response (152).

Macy goes on to say that expressing our grief for the planet and for all the beings that our insane behavior of the past 300 years has put at risk of extinction is precisely what we need to be doing at this time. More of us. All of us. This is because the crisis of mass extinction

derives from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self. It derives from a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries; that it is so small and so needy that we must endlessly acquire and endlessly consume; and that as individuals, corporations, nation-states, or a species, we can be immune to what we do to other beings. (152).

            If this—that the notion of the separate self is a delusion; that the self is actually more like some interactive process whose boundaries can hardly be named—sounds like something a Buddhist or a spiritual leader (like Pope Francis) would say, that is because it is. Joanna Macy is indeed a practitioner of Buddhism and her take on the crisis of our time is informed by her practice. But it is not just that. She also uses the systems theory of Gregory Bateson to shore up what might be dismissed as spiritual or religious or New Age mumbo jumbo. And what she uses Bateson to confirm is his idea (and many neuroscientists are now reaching similar conclusions) that the conventional notion of the “self” or “consciousness” cannot be reduced, as it normally is, to the “isolated subjectivity of the individual or located within the confines of the skin.” Rather, Bateson says that

“the total self-corrective unit that processes information is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or what is popularly called ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’”….and… “The self as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding.” (153)

For Macy, of course, this notion of a self-corrective feedback system involving self and other approximately coincides with her main point about the Buddha’s teaching, i.e., that self and world are not separate, are not individual entities where one or the other is primary; but rather, self and world arise together, or co-dependently (the doctrine is called paticca samuppada: dependent co-arising). They are inextricably intertwined and cannot be separated. Self acts on other just as other acts on self. Mind acts on matter just as matter acts on mind. Neither can exist without the other, nor is one the primary cause of the other (recent news about how the Big Bang may not really be the origin of it all, for there may be no origin, period, tends to fit with these ideas). Once this wisdom is felt or absorbed or seen into, one can no longer contemplate or even countenance doing damage to any other being or entity in the “outside” world, for there is no outside world. You grieve when you see a mountaintop being removed as much as you do when you observe birds and bees being poisoned by pesticides or helpless children being worked to death in gold mines or polar bears being starved because they can no longer hunt from the sea ice necessary to their being. You grieve because you know via your senses and every other mode of perception that you and they and all the beings of the past and those to come are ineluctably connected; are one web of life in which every part, no matter how small or humble, is necessary and critical to every other part and ultimately to the whole.

            Hence, for Joanna Macy, grieving for what we see and hear is happening to that web of life is not something to avoid, or deny; it is something to embrace, for it is only through facing it, through “being present to and owning our own pain” that we can begin to comprehend how much all our “selves” are intertwined and at risk with all others and, therefore, begin to find ways to change the way the world, in its ‘normal’ operating procedure, does them violence. Whether it will be in time to prevent the global catastrophe that appears to be bearing down upon us is not the point. Or not the only point. The point is to be alive to what is happening, to break open, and from that feeling of being part of that “great net from which one cannot fall,” to derive the courage to stand up to the deadly forces now in charge. 

            This is the healing message that Joanna Macy voices for us. And it is a courageous and healing message that, in the present state of things—with the ever-more-ignorant Sen. James Inhofe throwing snowballs in the Senate chamber to ‘prove’ that global warming is a hoax—is more necessary than ever. Take a look at her book. Give it to those who are young enough to get aroused. And take heart that there are indeed masses of people all around the globe who feel as you do and will, if we are very lucky, wake up before it’s too late and take the selfless (which is just another word for ‘heroic’) actions that are so necessary.

            In this regard, I would also recommend the most recent work of renowned Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (his Stanford Prison Experiment has become the gold standard for investigating what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”), who has embarked on a new path—not investigating what makes ordinary people evil, but rather what it is that makes ordinary people heroic. Though it is not a simple idea or a simple effort, Zimbardo has stated its basic premise quite simply, and it accords with what has been outlined above:

Simply put, then, the key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward. http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_makes_a_hero/

That’s it precisely, and is precisely what is needed now to counter the dominant delusion of selfishness, of ‘looking out for number one’ regardless of the consequences to others be they animal, vegetable or mineral. One can only hope that Zimbardo and his colleagues are successful in promoting this paradigm shift among the young. For it is the young, after all, who are going to have the bear the real burden of the failure of the rest of us—our failure to realize what we truly are, our collective failure to act swiftly and courageously enough to rescue what’s left of the only home we have.

Lawrence DiStasi

            

Climate Depression

I’m in a kind of climate depression. Yes, it’s an actual term, as you can see if you read a little blog (http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.com/2014/10/climate-change-fatigue-or-eco-depression.html) I found describing what happened recently to a Professor Camille Parmesan: she became so “professionally depressed” that, even with a Nobel Peace Prize (shared with Al Gore in 2007 as lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC), she started questioning her whole life’s work, moved out of the U.S. to the U.K, and doubted that she’d ever return to studying the dying coral reefs that are her specialty. Nor is she alone, she said: “I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost.”

            My depression, though, is not from doing science or even my recent reading of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything (see blog for Nov. 30, 2014). Because the truth is, Klein soft-pedaled the real situation by focusing on what we, the people of the Earth, especially those in developed nations, could do to keep the warming of the earth from exceeding 2 degrees Celsius. Her implication clearly was that we still had time (though only till 2017); and that if we could just rid ourselves of capitalism and move from an ideology of extractivism to one of stewardship, we could prevent global catastrophe. And of course, we all want to believe that, human brains being wired to believe there is hope no matter how massive the problem, the worst is always in the distant future, yes, we can somehow figure out a fix. An interview that the journalist Dahr Jamail did with climate scientist Guy McPherson, though, dashed that view completely. The title of the piece, appearing on Truthout.org, gives the idea quickly: “Are Humans Going Extinct?” And what the piece concludes is that, yes, the extinction of our species is already well under way due to climate change, and is probably inevitable.

            Guy McPherson deserves some attention in this regard; he’s a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona who has been studying anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) for three decades. A lot of what he has been finding and preaching can be found on his website with the apt title: Nature Bats Last (http://guymcpherson.com/). I highly recommend it, though it is not for the faint of heart. Because what he says is sobering indeed—so sobering, in fact, that McPherson, suffering a kind of climate depression himself, has changed his message from the dreadful warnings about what he sees coming, to counseling people to just do what they love because it’s not going to matter much as far as the climate is concerned. Naomi Klein cited a paper Brad Werner gave at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 2012—“Is Earth F**ked?”—and its title is relevant here; because for McPherson and many of the scientists he cites, the answer is a clear “Yes.” Earth Is Fucked. Or rather, not earth itself—for earth will survive as it has many times in the past; but for the human species and most other life on the planet, Earth is, indeed, fucked. Is, if the numbers are correct, heading for a mass extinction event comparable to the Permian Extinction about 250 million years ago that wiped out 95% of marine and 70% of terrestrial species then living.

            With regard to the 2 degree limit that Klein stakes her whole book on, McPherson and many other scientists insist we’re already there. That is to say, as Dr. Peter Wadhams, one of the most cautious commenters on the climate and head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge, asserts in his August 8, 2014 youtube video: ‘the 2 degree limit was already reached in the 1960s.’ That is, even if we had stopped carbon emissions in 1960, the 2 degree warming would be reached anyway as a result of all the carbon emitted until then. I think this is something not widely understood and it should be: carbon emissions take something like 40 years to produce their effects. So trying for a 2 degree limit now is a fool’s errand; as is creating the impression that we still have time to reach a 2 degree limit, which is really a kind of subterfuge engaged in by governments and UN conferences and the IPCC. And in fact, McPherson quotes Wadhams thusly: “the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere, which now exceeds 400 parts per million, is sufficient, if you don’t add any more, to actually raise global temperatures in the end by about 4 degrees.” Again, it’s that 40-year gap between emissions and warming. If emissions up to 1960 are enough to reach 2 degrees, and the emissions we’ve been pouring into the atmosphere since then are greater by many degrees of magnitude, then it’s clear that unless some miracle happens, we’re well on the way to 4 degrees or more by as soon as midcentury (this does not even include the damage done by methane [an even more deadly warming gas] seeps which, on their own, according to one researcher, will raise global-average temperatures by more than 4 degrees Celsius by 2030). And 4 degrees, or 5 or 6 or more, as many scientists project, essentially makes the planet uninhabitable by humans—a “dead planet” according to McPherson, on which no one, not even the very wealthy who think to insulate themselves in safe havens surrounded by their own police, will be safe. (By the way, the base line against which temperature increases such as 2 degrees Celsius are measured is the temperature in 1750, about when the Industrial Revolution began).

            In short, we as a species are fucked.

            Now every fiber in my being rebels when I write this. Even “knowing” what I know (and it should be clear to everyone that most of us really don’t have any firsthand way to verify the effects scientists keep warning us about; we have to weigh the evidence, yield to majority scientific opinion, take into account recent unusual climate events like Hurricane Sandy and the melting Arctic Ice, and act accordingly—which is why idiots like Senator James Inhofe and the hucksters at the Heartland Institute can keep blowing smoke to confuse the issue and maintain that the whole global warming scare is a hoax cooked up by Hollywood liberals like Barbara Streisand—Inhofe actually said that!—to advance the liberal/socialist agenda), even knowing what I know I want to leave humanity an exit, an escape hatch. Surely there is some technological fix that will save us (Klein debunks this in her chapter called “No Messiahs.”) We are, after all, the quintessence of dust, the paragon of animals, as Hamlet put it. The chosen species, the lords of creation. Which is, in fact, part of the problem. We really do think we are special. We really do see ourselves as separate from all other species—which we lump together as “Nature.” And granted by God “dominion” over them all, inalienable rights over all creation. I was raised to believe this, we were all raised and indoctrinated into believing this. So it’s almost impossible to believe otherwise; to believe that this time, there really is no technological fix (even Peter Wadhams suggests some temporary geo-engineering miracle that can give us time), no god or leader or scientist or group action that can save us. But if Guy McPherson and most scientists are right, that is precisely the ‘fix’ we are in; the hole we have dug ourselves. Our arrogance, our ignorance of the interrelatedness of all species, of our dependence on all others including lowly bacteria and dirt for our sustenance, has led us to think—since Francis Bacon expressed it 400 years ago—that we can and should treat the globe as our own little ball, to be used up and exploited in any way we can imagine to make our journey more comfortable. Blow off the tops of mountains to get at coal. Spread poisons on the soil to make farming easier, to make growth and life itself possible only for those plants that we can consume; those insects and birds and fish and mammals that we consider useful to us. The rest be damned, dammed, including the life-giving waters from which we sprang. Now we are seeing, as McPherson’s website warns us like a siren screaming in the night that Nature really does Bat Last. That we pay a price for imagining ourselves as separate from all else. And that the price may be the ultimate price any species can pay: extinction.

            This makes me cry in the night. This has given me an intense pain in my soul. It has even forced me to reconsider writing this, or thinking about this anymore at all. It is too depressing; too cataclysmic; too destructive of everything and everyone I value. But in the end, I have to conclude that we cannot keep burying our heads in the sand. In the end, we are obligated—even “knowing” that it is futile—to keep trying to know, to ameliorate the situation to whatever extent we can. We have to keep trying to delay the worst effects, by working to browbeat or persuade or legislate or shame others into seeing the truth: the entire human project is in grave peril. Anything we can do to help save something, to delay the worst effects, as Wadhams says, until some solution, some miracle might be found, is worth doing, even if the odds of its working are miniscule. It is still worth doing. For it is no more than what we do daily anyway, in the face of our certain knowledge that we will die.

            Guy McPherson himself has come to this conclusion. After being viciously attacked for years, and seeing the sad effects his message has on people’s hopes, he has modified it: Keep doing what you love to do, he now counsels. Keep loving. Even if the worst happens, at least you will have done your best to create something of value in the world.

            I don’t know what else to say. I apologize if this is too disturbing. I apologize if it leaves you depressed or hopeless. All I can offer is the truth as it’s gathered at the website (which in turn has gathered it from the most reliable sources available) noted above. And the idea, too, that we really do not know the future, cannot predict it no matter how gifted our instruments, how clever our algorithms. We simply cannot ever know for sure what emergent evolution will come up with, what the universe itself will come up with. All we can do is trust that existence involves more than what our little brains can comprehend, and that in that enormous potential inherent in every inch of space lies the something that somehow, for untold billions of years, has been able to go on. And will continue.

Lawrence DiStasi