This is a wonderful heartfelt essay, and like all your work, contains a stubborn core of determination to outlast the crisis. This is how I ended my manuscript (as yet unpublished):
Modern industrial civilization, despite its enormous success in dominating humanity at the current epoch, does constitute a massive conceptual, political, and an ecological problem today[1]. The increase in negative trophic flows is now exponential. This is potentially worse than an Ice Age or a Mega-drought — it is possibly the nearest thing to an “extinction level event” that humanity has ever faced.
We need all hands, on deck, now, if we are to find a way of undoing the three interrelated conceptual errors in the current collective cognitive niches that make up most state societies:
1) that privatization of risk and property is good and prevents the “tragedy of the commons”(why is this an error? Because, it actually causes that tragedy, as I documented in West Africa, and because, while leading to productivity gains by encouraging greater work effort and investment by individuals, it also creates relative poverty that stunts the potential contributions of the majority);
2) that unequal access to power and justice is due to heritable and largely genetic differences in intelligence and impulse control, (an error because it is based on self-affirmation and system-justification fallacies, stimulating racist and eugenics movements) and finally,
3) the myth that human economies are supreme over “environmental concerns” so that what happens in “nature” is not relevant to human survival(do I need to spell this one out?).
All of these fallacies are cultural constructs. They are not laws derived from empirical evidence from the physical world.
Continued “economic growth” is not the solution to our most pressing existential problem, which is planet-wide ecocide. Nor is tinkering with our genome to make us less aggressive or more “suited” to civilized life: at least not if it means making us less willing to fight against injustice and inequality.
When I read E.O. Wilson’s recent lament about how the “modern” world is bewildering to our “stone-aged” brains, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It is not that our brains that are stuck in the Stone Age, it is our concepts that are stuck in civilization.
If we are befuddled, it is by the recent myths and hubris of state society. Our current crisis is not due our recent emergence from the Paleolithic.
Throughout history, moreover, many of these so-called stone-age brains have seen through the hubris of the powerful and challenged the myths that rationalize the steady stream of bullshit that has been used to normalize ecocide, colonialism, racism, genocide, and war. People all over the world have even died to see justice prevail; they have sacrificed and struggled to make a world, again, fit for all our children to live in.[2]
Humanity does not lack such people. Check your mirror.
[1]“As Homo sapiens’s entry in any intergalactic design competition, industrial civilization would be tossed out at the qualifying round. It doesn’t fit. It won’t last. The scale is wrong. And even its apologists admit that it is not very pretty. The design failures of industrially/technologically driven societies are manifest in the loss of diversity of all kinds, destabilization of the earth’s biogeochemical cycles, pollution, soil erosion, ugliness, poverty, injustice, social decay, and economic instability.”
— David W. Orr, 1994, Earth In Mind, p.104
[2]This list of recommendations will be shocking to some, but it is not as though our current industrial economy is salvageable in any case. We can do this. We have the tools: we know how to restore soil ecosystems, support nutrient recycling and detoxification of water and soils, “re-wild” keystone species, save endangered species, plant trees and actually restore forests by succession, stop clear cut logging; we also know a thing or two about how to encourage permaculture, agro-forestry, gardening, farmers’ markets, backyard chickens, and bicycles. We learned some lessons from the struggle to severely regulate or ban asbestos, lead in paint, pipes, and gasoline, use of tobacco, thalidomide, and DDT. So let us use these lessons to severely regulate or ban toxic chemicals in food production and commercial forestry.
We know that over-population and constant high stress levels are not our friends. We know how to reduce poverty and injustice: how to educate women (and men), make heath care and family planning available to everyone, support attachment parenting, reduce violence, end homelessness, decriminalize psycho-reactive drug use, treat addiction medically, and guarantee annual income. We are getting better at encouraging compassion and tolerance, and at exposing and restraining the self-affirmation fallacies and corruption that often characterize elites. And we even know that aggressive war can be criminalized, although it is hard to make that stick.
I suspect, no I hope, that the enormous escalation of risks, as well as costs, that climate change will entail on every nation, in coming decades, will make inevitable the dismantling of to further investment in “development”. What will this mean, in practical terms? I means no more expansion, and even the moth-balling of industrial mining, mono-cropping, palm oil production, animal feeding operations, fishing fleets, rural real estate development, road building, dam building, oil pipelines, predator control, “sport hunting”, “adventure tourism”, cruise ships, air travel, and, eventually, production and use of internal combustion engines for war and trade. But we must not say so.
