by admin | Oct 29, 2018 | Uncategorized
What can we say about the recent IPCC report and its 12-year timeframe?
Climate scientists have long been balancing on a thin wire, trying to communicate the peril we are in without sounding alarmist or as if they have a political agenda. From an environmental activist point of view, they’ve been criticised for being too patient and cautious. Yet one thing we can be sure of now is that their language has gotten more urgent as time has passed and more evidence has accrued that we are passing the tipping points of a planet safe for human habitation. The IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have gone over review after review of their predictions, based on the best modelling we have at our disposal, and everything points to things being worse than they ever predicted. Oops – party stopper!
The Guardian article on the recent IPCC report is here
So let me try something, by putting this in everyday language … can we finally say, without sounding alarmist, and with the knowledge that we are starting to look really foolish and cowardly if we don’t, that we are now officially at the precipice of ecological collapse, as the environmental devastation of global capitalism runs amok and governments fall like dominoes to far right aggression? Can we talk about it yet? I’ve written before about how and why the “big man” caricature wins in dangerous times and it’s sad to see that I was right, in early 2016, and that it just keeps getting worse; now see Brazil’s new far right champion.
To get to the bottom of this phenomenon, I went back to the origins of large-scale civilizations to see what we can learn from them. When people get scared, they look for protection – even if the gang leader is the most threatening character in their world! In fact, that’s how classic standover tactics work: pay the thugs to make sure no-one harms you, with the strong insinuation that if you don’t, those very thugs will burn your house down overnight, whether you are in it or not. Now the house is the planet and the thugs are transnational corporations and the politicians that protect their interests. I don’t think we can hide from that anymore. What might have sounded like conspiracy theory 20 years ago is mainstream political analysis nowadays.
We’ve got to keep working on resilient communities; securing our own local food sources, finding ways to become less dependent on fossil fuels, getting together and sharing and taking care of each other. But we may need to start extending things like refusing single-use plastic and demanding food without poison in it, to actions based on the civil disobedience model. Here are a couple of examples:
Extinction Rebellion are standing against the unprecedented global emergency of the ecological crisis and the sixth mass extinction we are in the midst of, by asking for massive truth bombs about the real dangers we currently inhabit, shorn of media white washing and political inaction. They also feature a cool wallpaper-like set of visuals that neatly convey their core messages:
And Deep Green Resistance state that “Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
I loved reading Henry David Thoreau when I was first in university. He loved nature and fought for the truth; and it was he who coined the term civil disobedience. It is supposed to mean turning away from the law as it is encoded by vested interests, when you can tell there is a greater truth arising from reality. As I reiterated recently: Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 we have known that industrial civilisation threatens the health of our planet. It is time we started to really act like this shit is getting real and getting out of our comfort zone. We deserve better, so do the next generations, and so do the animals and plants that have so far survived the onslaught of modern technological civilisation. And hey, we might even enjoy getting down to it! Maybe it’s not the end of the party after all …
by admin | Oct 17, 2018 | Uncategorized
Of course it is OK to have white skin. Just like it is OK to have black, red, yellow or any other shade of skin colour. But this isn’t about race; it’s about culture. Specifically, it’s about feeling as if the culture you identify with is under siege. Displaying the sign, or supporting a Senate motion, asserting that it is OK to be white, is a clear symbol of distress. This signalling shows that, for some white people, who they are and what they stand for seems to be under threat. Specifically, in this case, that the privileges they previously took for granted are being taken away.
You get it: once you have gotten used to having something, you get a sense of entitlement pretty quickly, and it gets hard to let it go. No-one likes to lose ground, face or privilege. So how did white people get here – to the place that some of them now think they’re losing? This goes back to the industrial revolution, which took place in Britain and Western Europe a few hundred years ago due to a large number of fortuitous factors, or a kind of ‘Golden Age’. In short, there was support for scientific enquiry, intellectual freedom of thought, a willingness to apply findings in the name of development (bloody capitalism again!) and a previously untapped resource. Add coal to the steam engine et voila, you have global dominance.
We all know what else came with this age of rapid machine age colonisation. White people spread across the world, taking their newfound freedom to move around, extract a seemingly unending stream of ‘resources’ such as fossil fuels and forests, and processing them into … modern society. The dominance of cities, buildings, railways, ships, cars and planes all grow exponentially. With this came modern medicine, huge monoculture crops and food security, roads and other infrastructure (cue the hilarious scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian on “What have the Romans ever given us?”).
But even to the extent that these can be experienced as ‘good’ things, they come at a cost we are now seeing more clearly with each passing year. Modern society and rampant technological development relies upon treating our environment as a set of resources available to us and used for our benefit; as these are depleted so we see the devastation we have wreaked upon the earth in the name of progress. And just as the machine age of the military industrial complex has chewed through the earth, so it has treated the people of the land; colonising without hesitation, in Australia even declaring Terra Nullius as if the First Peoples didn’t even exist, simply because they didn’t subdue nature and build civilisation the way our ancestors did.
All of this is part of white privilege; of sensing that ‘we’ are the winning team, the unassailable leaders of the rest of the world, the winners in the race for more stuff. Now, lots of other people have caught up and even overtaken western leadership in terms of technological evolution. Globalisation makes us more even with other societies and their markets.
The “It’s OK to be white” movement is part of a knee-jerk reaction against losing privileges that came from fortuitous circumstances. It is also part of a slippery slope towards fascism, which we are seeing way too much of in the west of late. If we want to be leaders now, we need to recognise the cost of what has brought us all here, to the precipice of climate collapse and the IPCC’s recent 12 year warning that we have to change fast or risk inevitable collapse. No matter what racial or cultural alignment we identify with, we all need to evolve into better ecological citizens and lead wider society to do the same, or we’re screwed.
We can only succeed in the radical transformation of modern society required to pull this off if we work together; this is a movement that makes skin colour, like sexual orientation, less important and more a matter of personal choice. Choose something more deeply rooted in the earth than cultural politics and side with becoming more mature ecological citizens, as self-aware primates capable of conscious evolution, compassion and generosity. Lead with that and it won’t matter whether you’re white or purple.
by admin | Dec 3, 2017 | Uncategorized
Myth deals with life and death. It explains how we are connected to the otherworld that exists eternally regardless of the the circumstances of our own personal lives. In an effort to stave off the horror of death, we use technology to try and convince ourselves that we are beyond such mortal concerns. Thus the cities of light we have created with electricity represent both heaven and hell; a Factory of Fire that keeps the darkness at bay but also threatens to heat up our planet beyond its carrying capacity for life.
What we need to do now is to recreate modern myth on an eco-friendly scale and remember what the ancestors taught: part of us is always connected to the endless universe out of which we were birthed, that we were born out of star dust, that our true home is right here, right now and also everywhere all the time, that we need not fear death, that we should consume only what we need of the earth, which is alive and responsive to our actions, and that we should treat all life on this planet as sacred, including ourselves.
by admin | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
A myth, in common usage, has come to mean simply a falsehood. A fairy story that can’t be true, a lie perpetrated on a gullible crowd, snake oil for the masses. But the reason we came to think of a myth like this is because it originally meant a powerful symbolic story, which was associated with people who hadn’t learnt reason and didn’t yet realise that technology could get us whatever we wanted. We didn’t need the gods anymore, because we’d proven they didn’t exist and aren’t effective in stopping the onslaught of the victorious society. And the victorious society turns out to be the one that has moved on from such primitive superstitions to take control of the world on their own terms.
But the real myth is that we could have control over the earth and its ‘resources’. This is the myth of the colonising forces. Technological power has seduced us – the members of said winning teams – into believing that its accomplice, reason, dissolves the falsehoods of the ancient, the exotic, the primitive societies we have replaced with our superior powers. And thanks to the extreme desire to exterminate all alternatives to its one God, medieval Christianity did manage to burn out most alternative ways of thinking. A symbolic understanding of the way that other creatures of the earth are our plant and animal kin, along with our intimate and meaningful relationships with even the landscape itself and all its elements, went underground. But it never completely died out. Like the native animism of the Americas, it simply learnt to live within the dominant paradigm, hiding like Halloween spirits ready to burst out at night when the priests weren’t looking.
A real myth, a successful myth, convinces you that the way you live is natural, as well as linked to a bigger picture, a more-than-human reality, another world beyond this one. Neat trick huh? Watch the full 40 minute version of City Living, Nature Calling, the first ever eco mythic documentary series, for more fun debunking and recreating of the world!
by admin | Nov 15, 2017 | Uncategorized
In a timely reminder of how concrete scientific data can be questioned, overturned, ignored and manipulated, 15,000 scientists just composed an open letter to humanity as an update to the consensus reached at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. As I point out in City Living, Nature Calling, it was 25 years ago now that scientists agreed that the damage being done to the earth by industrialised humanity had to be reversed before it became catastrophic and irreversible. I’m glad that a very comprehensive and influential list of scientists have now increased the urgency of that warning – although of course it is terrifying that they have to do so, with the evidence mounting daily about the danger we and all life on earth are now in.
Here are the opening sentences of the new letter, dated the 14th of November – just days after the first ever ecomythic documentary was launched upon the world, which looks into why we haven’t changed and how we still can: ‘A new, dire “warning to humanity” about the dangers to all of us has been written by 15,000 scientists from around the world. The message updates an original warning sent from the Union of Concerned Scientists that was backed by 1,700 signatures 25 years ago. But the experts say the picture is far, far worse than it was in 1992, and that almost all of the problems identified then have simply been exacerbated. Mankind is still facing the existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population, they warn. And “scientists, media influencers and lay citizens” aren’t doing enough to fight against it, according to the letter.’
Many people will today say that things are changing too quickly; our computing hardware and software has to be updated constantly, everything solid seems to be made to break, forcing overconsumption in the name of profit, politic systems are in turmoil … the list goes on. But the stuff we should be changing fast, like the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, getting rid out of disposable packaging like plastic water bottles (amongst millions of other examples), replacing toxic agricultural practices (overdosing on pesticides and fertilisers) with more sustainable practices and so on, are not being changed fast enough at all.
We need to shift the way we do things, to speed up the stuff that should be changing and replace the disposable mentality with a commitment to hard wearing, long lasting products and a more eco-friendly scale. And we need to do it now, for life on earth in the present and in the future.
