I have been puzzling over social illusions for a long time. We all have them, of course; nobody is exempt. Some illusions are convenient; some are outright lies, but of little consequence. But some illusions are far more dangerous than the rest. Some dangerous illusions result in criminals being prosecuted and going to jail; some do not. Others may merely result in personal losses such as injury or financial loss due to the bad judgements that illusions may encourage.
But there are much more dangerous illusions, some of which can threaten the survival of large groups, even species. Many ‘resources’ are plundered on the basis of mythic assumptions of endless abundance in a finite world. Whaling mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries almost extinguished populations of whales worldwide, but did not peak until the 1960s and was not banned internationally until the 1980s. Even with today’s restrictions on whaling, the great sea mamals struggle to come back. with all the dangerous pollution, ship stricks, net/rope entanglements, and loss of food sources, some whales today are significantly smaller than they once were. Taking a broad look at myths and illusions on a societal scale, humanity is at greater risk today of falling prey to its illusions than ever before.
Various civilizations have collapsed in the past and others have arisen to replace them. Today, industrial civilization is on a trajectory toward total collapse, barring massive intervention and a kind of revolutionary change I call the New Great Transformation of society itself. The greatest predicament to face humanity is happening today, as humanity holds on to certain myths and illusions that if left unchecked will result in our certain demise.
At the core of it all is the myth of perpetual economic growth on a finite planet. That myth has spurred and/or sustained various illusions, even in relation to attempts to correct our course toward sustainability, resilience, and necessary revolutionary change.
Sustainability
I never liked the term “global warming” because it projected such a pleasant imagery for a phrase that was supposed to describe a growing threat to humanity as well as Earth System stability. Same goes for the current euphemism, “climate change.” Change is good, right? Well, not necessarily. Again, the concept is so neutral for a devastating transformation of such a key component of the Earth System. “Sustainability” has a slightly different problem.
Sustainability is a relative term that only has meaning in terms of what is to be sustained, or not, and what are the destructive consequences that would make the what ‘unsustainable.’ As it turns out, in most of its usage in relation to climate action or action in service to protecting ecosystems, the underlying goal is to find ways to sustain existing industrial-consumer lifestyles and industrial production and consumption while somehow at the same time, “protecting the environment.” People, especially those in power, talk about ‘greening’ the economy by taking marginal steps to reduce environmental pollution and/or waste. Because these are really ways to dodge the deeper problem, we call such diversions “greenwashing.”
What is far too often overlooked is the need to focus on how a practice affects how sustainable the planetary system stability will be, or not, after the practice continues over time. That of course, is where global industrial civilization went so very wrong.
Renewable energy resources for example, suffer from the myth of economic renewability of an energy source in the narrow sense, for example, of corn being planted over and over again to supply biofuel, in comparison to taking non-renewable oil and gas from the earth until the supply is exhausted. however, soil depletion, river pollution,, and loss of food crops are not considered in concluding that the practice is ‘sustainable.’ Nor are all renewable sources of energy clean, that is, free from causing pollution of one kind or another.
Not usually considered by interested economic parties is that biofuel development robs the Earth of preciously rare agricultural land suitable for raising food crops in a world where crop failures and food insecurity grow daily. At the same time, climate-change induced erratic weather disrupts crops all over the world. Biofuels are, contrary to agribusiness claims, not at all sustainable if we are to achieve a stable food system. Countless other examples of ‘greenwashing’ industries and practices could be cited, but what about resilience?
Resilience
Check out the excellent website organized around the concept of resilience at the URL, resilience.org. It publishes articles that relate to “insight and inspiration in turbulent times.” The underlying idea is to explore ways to adapt to and mitigate the threats to our existence that proliferate today. That is why ‘decarbonization’ is at the center of the conversation.
As the website header proclaims, Resilience.org is a program of the nonprofit organization Post Carbon Institute. The Post Carbon Institute is “dedicated to helping the world transition away from fossil fuels and build sustainable, resilient communities.” Many of its articles are reprinted from other sources, blogs, newspaper articles, etc. I even published a few articles there myself several years ago. I highly recommend reading the many insightful articles presented on resilience.org.
I whole heartedly agree with the goals of resilience.org and the Post Carbon Institute. However, resilience is not enough, especially if it is equated with adaptation. The essence of the problem we face is that virtually nothing is being done by the elites who control fossil-fueled industrial-consumer political economies to transition away from fossil fuels, that is, to mitigate the damage that the global deployment of that energy source has caused. Too many people confuse resilience with adaptation. The only truly resilient society is one that overcomes its dependency on fossil fuels and radically reduces its consumption of oil and gas as the core of a program of energy conservation, to mitigate the damage that the system we inhabit and participate in has caused.
Only by conserving energy can society’s core needs be met without destroying the ecosystems on which we depend and without so destabilizing global climate patterns that the Earth System can no longer provide the climate or ecological stability that allowed the flourishing of humanity through most of the eleven thousand years or so of the Holocene geologic epoch–until recently. That can only happen now through revolutionary change in the very core organization of industrial civilization.
Revolutionary Change
Oh my! That word, ‘revolution,’ is rather scary. Well, yes. When we look back in history we see mostly bloodshed and violence in connection with revolutions—which as often as not merely resulted in a replacement of one elite with another at the top of a rigid hierarchy, and with little benefit to almost everyone else, whatever the ideology claims.
Of course, we like to think that the American Revolution, while born in a revolutionary war, is an exception in that it produced the most prominent democratic republic in the world. It would seem that that revolution was good, while the bloody revolution that produced the Soviet Union and all that Stalinist oppression was bad, even to the extent of producing that would-be Emperor of an aspirational new Russian Empire, the dictator Vladimir Putin. However, the goodness of the American Revolution is being tested today like never before. We seem as far from achieving “a perfect union” as ever.
Today, we must look to the future in very new ways if we are to forge an ecological civilization, as we must, and very soon. Clearly, that means rapid revolutionary change. Yet, the nineteenth century, or even eighteenth century political concept of revolution is entirely inadequate to our modern predicament. Can we hold on to the democratic principles outlined by the ‘founding fathers,’ abandoning their elitist tendencies to forge an equity and inclusive-wellbeing based political economy that also harmonizes with the ecosystems on which we depend for material survival?
So far, we continue on a path down the dead-end trajectory of extended industrialization with unending economic growth. That is clearly unsustainable on planet Earth. That unsustainability is with us now, even as corporate and government so-called ‘leaders’ make phony gestures feigning actions toward ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience.’ Our lives will be changed radically and in a very bad way if we allow the present trajectory toward collapse continue. What we all need, but may not want, is revolutionary change.
We can direct revolutionary change in a positive way by taking direct action now. We are left with no path to actually realizing the values of equity, sustainability, and resilience, without mounting a massive societal movement to force institutions, politicians, and executives to change their behavior (or get out of the way) while we try to initiate revolutionary change in our institutions and in the way we live, to achieve a viable ecological civilization.
Photo credit: joiseyshowaa on VisualHunt
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 