Photo credit: NASA, via Unsplash
Earthrise viewed from our moon gave many a broader perspective on the living Earth. There are so many well written and seriously researched analyses of where we are today and where we need to go, that there is simply no way to read them all. Most debates within that literature are over technical differences in the general consensus on the destabilization of the Earth System. So much is known about how the planet has been polluted by diverse forms of carbon, how ecosystems have been and are still being demolished at accelerating rates despite all the talk of greening this or that aspect of modernity.
In extreme contrast, the central imperative of economic growth at any cost is anti-democratic, although it has captured the minds of most. We all know how fascism takes over a nation, builds up its destructive forces and then destroys it. Yet, we watch with astonishment and take no significant political counter action, as politicians seek resolution in old broken paradigms.
Well, despite the clear examples from the twentieth century, too many citizens have not been exposed to the facts of history that are strikingly similar to our present situation. Nor have they noticed the past fascist tendencies in the USA. We have all been heavily bombarded for decades with the illusion of “American Exceptionalism.” Seeking absolute purity of an imaginary past, the new white nationalists would burn any book that describes the facts, from slavery, extermination of the First Americans, or the century of death squads and plunder of Central American nations, to the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, and all the rest.
The history of the growth of American power is even messier than the sanitized conventional discourse in textbooks that the MAGA censors imagine to be exaggerations and lies, as they attempt to forge pure morality from the blood of conquest and oppression.
But wait, there is so much more. The dominator culture that created both empire and industry was and remains pervasive. Its imperial impulse is not limited to dominating nations, for its prey is the entire world.
Okay, so where does that leave us? For the most part, nowhere, with no viable options that are recognized as legitimate by “the authorities” beyond more of the same. Lack of awareness of the existential threat of industrial civilization to the entire Earth System as well as itself, is the source of utter failure to engage in the ultimate debate, which in effect does not exist. How to salvage what we can from the behavioral sink of modernity, that is the only important question; all the rest consists of corollary complications.
The Only Debate that Matters Still Awaits us
One of the greatest obstacles to finding a path to a viable future for humanity, is the failure to recognize our actual place in the world—real versus imagined. To have the most important debate of all, we must first recognize our ecological place in the living Earth System. That requires a cultural paradigm shift of, literally, global proportions.
The industrial-consumer cultural paradigm pervades all our thinking, even when we think of how to take control of the already runaway processes of ecological destabilization. Most proposed “solutions” to the heating of the planet involve setting targets and goals for reducing carbon emissions or ecological destruction. Or, they may propose cessation of the industrial system’s ardent actions of deforestation, or the restoration of ecosystems by various means, most of which are valid in themselves, but do not address the root cause of Earth System destabilization.
Proximate causes of climate chaos, such as carbon emissions, population growth, and destruction of ecosystems in the processes of resources extraction, are all driven by the singular global process of unbridled and indiscriminate economic growth. Most wars are intended to win competitions over the materials, energy and workers needed to continue and accelerate economic growth—most often with a gloss of cultural resentment or retribution. However, even if international conflicts were resolved, no climate action, despite the fact that most are needed, can overcome the leviathan of putatively perpetual economic growth. The underlying fact remains, the best adaptation is mitigation. And only mitigation resolves the root cause: Industrial Civilization, the system itself.
As long as economic growth is the integral underlying motivation for politics, from local to global, the most important debate will never see the light of public discourse. Political debates always revolve around competing interests, and the public interest is usually not much more than a talking point. Who speaks for the living Earth System?
Let the Earth System Frame Our Debate
I am hopeful that some of the new climate-action formations in Europe and elsewhere recognize that the conventional ‘climate action’ orientation is not enough. I am not hopeful that much of the new effort will arise in the USA. Science itself is under attack, along with all other positive cultural movements and actions. Some of our best scientists are being driven to seek employment in other countries where climate consciousness is present within the political culture. They are welcomed by those who want to seek real solutions, beyond mere technical assurances, where recognition of the necessity for societal transformation to accomplish ecologically necessary techno-industrial transformations, which have so far eluded genuine debate in the US.
I have sometimes joked that the so-called “hard sciences”—physics, chemistry, biology, and their derivatives—are not really the hardest. Instead, the so-called “soft sciences”—sociology, psychology, political science, and their derivatives—are the really hard sciences, so difficult because of the consciousness and agency of actors and the consequent difficulty in predicting human behavior.
Well, the science of societal transformation for ecological restoration (and human survival) is an area where that is demonstrably true. However, the societal forces that are sometimes predictable must now be transformed to achieve human survival in the context of the inevitable destruction of industrial civilization. That in turn is becoming the context for the possible creation of a new ecological civilization that operates in harmony with Nature in the environment of the Earth System that is our only home.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 