Remarks delivered under the title “Climate Change and Health” at the Dialog on Sustainability, Kansas State University, July 22, 2017
I'm going to start with 3 suppositions:
The first thing is that the system is
broken. I have always considered myself to be in the hope business,
but I'm finding it hard to find the way through right now. A joke
president, the EPA in the hands of the James Inhofe gang, with a
stolen Supreme Court seat, even the modest gains made by the Obama
administration rolled back...
It's pretty clear at this stage that
climate change is not going to be dealt with on anything like the
scale necessary on anything like the timeframe necessary. I don't see
away that out current economic and political system is going to, for
instance, force Exxon to take billions of gigatons of proven oil
reserves off its books. I don't see a way that we're going to justly
treat those in other countries who will be made refugees due to
flooding, or loss of water or habitat. Any of us could name 10
policies that make perfect sense and that would address the issue but
we can't even get the least of them into legislation because
opposition from corporations and bought politicians.
The flaw in sustainability thinking is
that it's based on the capitalist mindset. Our framing is always, we
can have our cake and eat it too: we can continue 3% growth per year
but we do it with wind turbines and solar panels! But no, we can't.
The earth can't continue to sustain growth at these levels, no matter
how we power it. We need to strive not for “sustainable
development”, but for de-growth. This is what eco-activist and
Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy calls “the great turning” - from the
Industrial Growth Society to Life-Sustaining Society. It's
revolutionary, and we have to think of it as such.
But we're reaching a point where it
takes too great an act of will to think that everything's all right,
or presently may be. Because it's starting to affect us. Jay Antle
went to a conference where the city planners of Tuscon Arizona told
them they're planning for 20 days of over 120 degrees per year within
20 years.
I'm sure you all saw the kerfuffle
about the New York Magazine article about climate's worst case scenario.
The biggest blowback came from climate scientists like Michael Mann, who
said a) the science behind worst case scenario isn't proven and b)
messaging studies show us that dooms-saying doesn't motivate people.
But you know what? Screw that. It's not like 20 years of “We can
fix this!” messaging has led us anywhere. In 12-step programs it is
said that we're only willing to change when we run out of other
options. It's called “the gift of desperation.” I think we're at
that place in America.
So if corporations aren't going to help
us, and government can't help us, and half the country would
basically rather see the world destroyed for the sake of their political story,
than what do we do? We can either start stocking weaponry and
canned goods, or we can develop ways to sustain ourselves, and each other.
And the way we do that is through what Joanna Macy calls “the three dimensions of the great turning,” which I'm going to frame as
resistance, resilience, and love.
Resistance is addressing and holding
back further destruction or that help people thru. It could be
anything from soup kitchens to mass demonstrations to the camp at Standing Rock.
Actually, a lot of what KIFA does is in this category – we're
always trying to stop things from getting worse. Gandhi called this
kind of thing “obstructive action.”
This is where a lot of us are right
now, and have been for some time, but it's not enough. As Jung put
it, “What we resist, persists.” If all we're doing is opposing,
then we're not getting anywhere.
Building resilience is our growing
edge. It is what Gandhi called “constructive action,” and it's
building the ability to care for ourselves and our communities
outside of the corporate system. Examples of this are many: community
gardens, cooperative businesses, community level energy generation,
collaborative living situations, tool libraries – all kinds of
things that grow the alternative. We should be spending at least as
much time on resilience, on constructive action, as we do on
resistance.
You know that during the WWI and WWII
there were so-called victory gardens all over the country. There are
pictures of state capitols with the lawns under cultivation. That's
what we need. Community gardens can't be seen as a hobby, they have
to be seen as a necessary part of resilience. Everybody should be
taking part in them, and they should basically be everywhere.
Local energy, locally developed
transportation options, tool libraries, community level health care
This is also where we educate – about the harms of industrial society, about the necessity of degrowth.
So think of it this way. If our
consumption level is here (hand held above head), and our “needs” are met by
centralized, industrial, corporate providers, then we're toast. If
our consumption levels are here (hand held chest high) and we build local and regional ways
to address them, then the amount we have to get from our corporate
masters is less, and that builds resilience. That means that limiting
consumption, what used to be called “voluntary simplicity,” is a
core element of what we're need to accomplish. The less we consume,
the less we need to produce, and if making that change on a mass
level is really vital if we hope to build a sustainable future.
I want to recommend to you a book
called “Building a Healthy Economy From the Bottom Up” by AnthonyFlaccavento. He enumerates 6 transitions that are necessary to make
transformative economic change:
- on the household level, from dependence to resilience;
- on the local level, from trickle-down to bottom up;
- from concentrated wealth to community capital;
- regional and national networks bringing together localized efforts into larger-scale efforts;
- developing community supported arts and media;
- and finally, reshaping public policy by engaging people already mobilized by the prior transitions to reclaim and re-energize our democracy.
We don't have the time to explore these
in depth here, but this is the kind of thing that I think we need to
do in order to build a future that works for more than the top 10%.
By building these economic alternatives
we not only build resilience but we build a constituency for the kind
of public policy changes that will enable these transitions to take
place. Because of course we're always going to live in a globalized
world and if we want to carve out our place in it we're going to have
to engage a lot of people. This is the role that advocacy of the type
KIFA does – there are many laws which limit our ability to build
economic alternatives – everything from the restrictions on
third-party power purchasing to banking and investment regulations
that privilege institutional investors. Our role is to try to make
sure there's room legally to do what we need to do.
And the third category of the Great
Turning. Joanna Macy calls it “shift in consciousness.” I'm
calling it “love.” Love isn't a feeling – it's an action, a
spiritual practice that changes our perception of reality.
What we need is a recognition, not just
intellectually but spiritually, in our deepest selves, that we are
all in this together, that to use the phrase of Thich Naht Hanh, we
inter-are, that not only can't I succeed without you but in fact
there is literally no me without you. That means our family, our
fellowship, our town, the “stranger”, the people who seem other,
and even the earth itself – they not only are entitled to all the
same rights and privileges that we are, but they are us. This is not,
or not solely, a political path – this is a spiritual path. That
element of the work cannot be overlooked.
We live in a reality that's based on an
imperative of competition, hyper-individualism and GDP growth that is
damaging not only the planet, but us as well. I should probably
mention health here: the increased in obesity, in diabetes, in use of
psychological medications, in cancer rates, in resistant infections,
are all a product of the same dynamics that produce climate change.
Our consumer society is sick, we ourselves are physically, mentally,
and spiritually sick. Stepping out of consumer capitalism is, in my
opinion, the first and best step we can take for renewed health, both
of ourselves and of those around us. When people build local
resilience and relationships, when we work in cooperation, that's not
only a strategy against climate disruption, it's a spiritual path as
well. It's the only way to move from climate despair to action that
has a chance of making a difference.
What is required is no less than a
revolution of values, where we not only change lightbulbs but we
change ourselves and our way of seeing the world and each other.
It's a revolution in our minds, in our
hearts, in our values, in our communities, in our lives.
At the risk of seeming ridiculous,
let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling
of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary
lacking this quality... We must strive every day so that this love
of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts
that serve as examples, as a moving force. - Che Guevara
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