Last night I watched the latest episode of Panorama, ‘Sleepless Britain’. It explored the problems of sleeplessness faced by many families, with visits to hospital caused by poor sleep having tripled in the last 10 years. A generation of young people not getting as much sleep as they should be is having knock-on impacts in terms of obesity, family breakup, health and education.
It has been shown that poor sleep can reduce academic performance by up to two school years, and many young people are now increasingly reliant on prescription medicines to enable them to get a good night’s sleep.
One of the key reasons the programme identified behind this is the explosion in the use of electronic devices, mostly iPads and smartphones, just before sleep. The blue light from such devices suppresses our body’s ability to create melatonin, the hormone which helps us get to sleep.
The programme followed several families as they tried to introduce an ‘electronic curfew’ of no screens in the hour before bed, and a more regular bedtime routine, with mixed success.
One of the things the programme didn’t touch on, and which struck me while watching it, was how our culture has developed a deep terror of the idea of ever being bored. It’s as though every waking minute has to be filled with some kind of stimulation, the “intensification of nervous stimulation” which Matthew B Crawford in The World Beyond Your Head argues is increasingly underpinning our world.
For many young people, the idea of an hour before bed where you have no screens, read a book, draw, meditate, take a long bath or just look out of the window, feels like a ridiculous waste of their time.
And yet boredom really matters. Many parents seem terrified of their kids ever being bored. That somehow, bored kids represent a parental failure. A paper in the journal Behavioural Sciences by Shane Bench and Heather Lench (I wonder if they chose to collaborate on it because their surnames rhymed so beautifully) called ‘On the Function of Boredom’, concludes that:
“Boredom provides a valuable adaptive function by signaling it is time to pursue a new goal”
I’m not suggesting that our kids should always be bored witless, rather that late night screens are a symptom of our devaluing time in which we are not nervously stimulated in one way or another. If our kids say they are bored, rather than handing them the iPad, perhaps we’d be better to just suggest they sit with that feeling for a while, and see what arises instead.
It’s as though we are always suppressing that moment, rather than sitting with it and seeing what awaits us on the other side.
Some, at least, of the time currently dedicated to swiping up, swiping down, and sending text messages which could just as easily form the basis of an actual conversation the following day, could be spent daydreaming. Like boredom, daydreaming is something that gets bad press these days.
Michael Gove I’m sure hates daydreaming with a passion (I think it was the only thing at school that I excelled in), and his influence over education has resulted in less and less time for it. Break times are being cut back in schools around the world as more time is demanded for teaching academic subjects. As Jonah Lehrer writes in an article called The Virtues of Daydreaming:
“It turns out that whenever we are slightly bored—when reality isn’t quite enough for us—we begin exploring our own associations, contemplating counterfactuals and fictive scenarios that only exist within the head”
While Freud dismissed daydreaming as “infantile”, more recent research has come to think of it as an “essential cognitive tool”. He references research by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler (who we’ll be publishing an interview with soon here) who argue that “creative solutions may be facilitated specifically by simple external tasks that maximize mind-wandering”.
Have you ever found yourself wondering who wrote a particular song, or scored a particular goal, and then 2 hours later the answer just ‘popped into your head’? Our brains have an amazing ability to work on problems without our being consciously aware of them. As Lehrer puts it:
“Question(s) need to marinate in the mind, “incubating” in those subterranean parts of the brain we can barely control”
So what are the kinds of simple tasks that facilitate this kind of thinking? Lehrer describes them as being tasks which “consume just enough attention to keep us occupied, while leaving plenty of mental resources left over for errant daydreams”.
So, not television, iPads, texting or homework, but rather the kinds of things which, sadly, have been largely purged from most family homes. Washing up, preparing food, kneading bread, knitting, gardening, sewing. Playing games together. Time without noise, entertainment, stimulation.
Activities which keep enough of our brains free for daydreaming.
And sleep, of course, which is the time when our brain makes sense of, and files away the day’s varied inputs, rather like librarians working night shifts to get all the books back on the shelves in the right places ready for the next day.
It’s not for nothing that Kierkegaard called sleep “the height of genius”. As Catherine Hill, a consultant pediatrician at Southampton children’s hospital, puts it in the Panorama program:
“If you could manufacture a pill that could improve your cognitive function, that improved your emotional regulation, that stopped you reaching for the biscuit tin in the afternoon, you’d be a millionaire. That is what sleep can help you with. It’s free, and available to us all”
And it’s not just kids for whom all this matters. Many adults are sleep deprived too. Perhaps I have just come up with the campaign idea with the least likelihood of mass engagement, but it deserves its place alongside the other great issues of our time.
“What do we want?” “The right to be bored! To have time to look out of the window! To chew over the day’s events while doing the dishes!” “When do we want it?” “Now!” I’d be there, on that particular demo.
The beauty, of course, is that it needs no permission, just a personal decision that this stuff matters.
The beauty of it though is that steps towards being a family that spends more time together with less distractions, that listens to each other rather than to YouTube videos, that cooks together, sharing skills, recipes and stories, that puts away the iPads and reaches for the boardgames, is going to be happier and healthier anyway.
As Lehrer puts it, daydreaming allows us to “to invent additional possibilities”. And goodness knows we need those, whatever age we are …
One of the many advantages of being a Druid is that you get to open your holiday presents four days early.
The winter solstice—Alban Arthuan, to use one term for it in the old-fashioned Druid Revival traditions I practice—is one of the four main holy days of the Druid year. Though the actual moment of solstice wobbles across a narrow wedge of the calendar, the celebration traditionally takes place on December 21.
Yes, Druids give each other presents, hang up decorations, and enjoy as sumptuous a meal as resources permit, to celebrate the rekindling of light and hope in the season of darkness.
Come to think of it, I’m far from sure why more people who don’t practice the Christian faith still celebrate Christmas, rather than the solstice.
It’s by no means necessary to believe in the Druid gods and goddesses to find the solstice relevant; a simple faith in orbital inclination is sufficient reason for the season, after all—and since a good many Christians in America these days are less than happy about what’s been done to their holy day, it seems to me that it would be polite to leave Christmas to them, have our celebrations four days earlier, and cover their shifts at work on December 25th in exchange for their covering ours on the 21st.
Back before my writing career got going, when I worked in nursing homes to pay the bills, my Christian coworkers and I did this as a matter of course; we also swapped shifts around Easter and the spring equinox. Religious pluralism has its benefits.
Those of my readers who don’t happen to be Druids, but who are tempted by the prospect just sketched out, will want to be aware of a couple of details.
For one thing, you won’t catch Druids killing a tree in order to stick it in their living room for a few weeks as a portable ornament stand and fire hazard.
Druids think there should be more trees in the world, not fewer! A live tree or, if you must, an artificial one, would be a workable option, but a lot of Druids simply skip the tree altogether and hang ornaments on the mantel, or what have you.
Oh, and most of us don’t do Santa Claus. I’m not sure why Santa Claus is popular among Christians, for that matter, or among anyone else who isn’t a devout believer in the ersatz religion of Consumerism—which admittedly has no shortage of devotees just now.
There was a time when Santa hadn’t yet been turned into a poorly paid marketing consultant to the toy industry; go back several centuries, and he was the Christian figure of St. Nicholas; and before then he may have been something considerably stranger.
To those who know their way around the traditions of Siberian shamanism, certainly, the conjunction of flying reindeer and an outfit colored like the famous and perilous hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria is at least suggestive.
Still, whether he takes the form of salesman, saint, or magic mushroom, Druids tend to give the guy in the red outfit a pass. Solstice symbolism varies from one tradition of Druidry to another—like almost everything else among Druids—but in the end of the tradition I practice, each of the Alban Gates (the solstices and equinoxes) has its own sacred animal, and the animal that corresponds to Alban Arthuan is the bear.
If by some bizarre concatenation of circumstances Druidry ever became a large enough faith in America to attract the attention of the crazed marketing minions of consumerdom, you’d doubtless see Hallmark solstice cards for sale with sappy looking cartoon bears on them, bear-themed decorations in windows, bear ornaments to hang from the mantel, and the like.
While I could do without the sappy looking cartoons, I definitely see the point of bears as an emblem of the winter solstice, because there’s something about them that too often gets left out of the symbolism of Christmas and the like—though it used to be there, and relatively important, too.
Bears are cute, no question; they’re warm and furry and cuddlesome, too; but they’re also, ahem, carnivores, and every so often, when people get sufficiently stupid in the vicinity of bears, the bears kill and eat them.
That is to say, bears remind us that actions have consequences.
I’m old enough that I still remember the days when the folk mythology surrounding Santa Claus had not quite shed the last traces of a similar reminder. According to the accounts of Santa I learned as a child, naughty little children ran a serious risk of waking up Christmas morning to find no presents at all, and a sorry little lump of coal in their stockings in place of the goodies they expected.
I don’t recall any of my playmates having that happen to them, and it never happened to me—though I arguably deserved it rather more than once—but every child I knew took it seriously, and tried to moderate their misbehavior at least a little during the period after Thanksgiving.
That detail of the legend may still survive here and there, for all I know, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the big guy in red is retailed by the media these days.
For that matter, the version I learned was a pale shadow of a far more unnerving original. In many parts of Europe, when St. Nicholas does the rounds, he’s accompanied by a frightening figure with various names and forms.
In parts of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, it’s Krampus—a hairy devil with goat’s horns and a long lolling tongue, who prances around with a birch switch in his hand and a wicker basket on his back.
While the saint hands out presents to good children, Krampus is there for the benefit of the others; small-time junior malefactors can expect a thrashing with the birch switch, while the legend has it that the shrieking, spoiled little horrors at the far end of the naughty-child spectrum get popped into the wicker basket and taken away, and nobody ever hears from them again.
Yes, I know, that sort of thing’s unthinkable in today’s America, and I have no idea whether anyone still takes it with any degree of seriousness over in Europe. Those of my readers who find the entire concept intolerable, though, may want to stop for a moment and think about the context in which that bit of folk tradition emerged.
Before fossil fuels gave the world’s industrial nations the temporary spate of abundance that they now enjoy, the coming of winter in the northern temperate zone was a serious matter.
The other three seasons had to be full of hard work and careful husbandry, if you were going to have any particular likelihood of seeing spring before you starved or froze to death.
By the time the solstice came around, you had a tolerably good idea just how tight things were going to be by the time spring arrived and the first wild edibles showed up to pad out the larder a bit.
The first pale gleam of dawn after the long solstice night was a welcome reminder that spring was indeed on its way, and so you took whatever stored food you could spare, if you could spare any at all, and turned it into a high-calorie, high-nutrient feast, to provide warm memories and a little additional nourishment for the bleak months immediately ahead.
In those days, remember, children who refused to carry their share of the household economy might indeed expect to be taken away and never be heard from again, though the taking away would normally be done by some combination of hunger, cold, and sickness, rather than a horned and hairy devil with a lolling tongue. Of course a great many children died anyway.
A failed harvest, a longer than usual winter, an epidemic, or the ordinary hazards of life in a nonindustrial society quite regularly put a burst of small graves in the nearest churchyard. It was nonetheless true that good children, meaning here those who paid attention, learned fast, worked hard, and did their best to help keep the household running smoothly, really did have a better shot at survival.
One of the most destructive consequences of the age of temporary abundance that fossil fuels gave to the world’s industrial nations, in turn, is the widespread conviction that consequences don’t matter—that it’s unreasonable, even unfair, to expect anyone to have to deal with the blowback from their own choices.
That’s a pervasive notion these days, and its effects show up in an astonishing array of contexts throughout contemporary culture, but yes, it’s particularly apparent when it comes to the way children get raised in the United States these days.
The interesting thing here is that the children aren’t necessarily happy about that.
If you’ve ever watched a child systematically misbehave in an attempt to get a parent to react, you already know that kids by and large want to know where the limits are.
It’s the adults who want to give tests and then demand that nobody be allowed to fail them, who insist that everybody has to get an equal share of the goodies no matter how much or little they’ve done to earn them, and so on through the whole litany of attempts to erase the reality that actions have consequences.
That erasure goes very deep. Have you noticed, for example, that year after year, at least here in the United States, the Halloween monsters on public display get less and less frightening? These days, far more often than not, the ghosts and witches, vampires and Frankenstein’s monsters splashed over Hallmark cards and window displays in the late October monster ghetto have big goofy grins and big soft eyes.
The wholesome primal terrors that made each of these things iconic in the first place—the presence of the unquiet dead, the threat of wicked magic, the ghastly vision of walking corpses, whether risen from the grave to drink your blood or reassembled and reanimated by science run amok—are denied to children, and saccharine simulacra are propped up in their places.
Here again, children aren’t necessarily happy about that. The bizarre modern recrudescence of the Victorian notion that children are innocent little angels tells me, if nothing else, that most adults must go very far out of their way to forget their own childhoods.
Children aren’t innocent little angels; they’re fierce little animals, which is of course exactly what they should be, and they need roughly the same blend of gentleness and discipline that wolves use on their pups to teach them to moderate their fierceness and live in relative amity with the other members of the pack.
Being fierce, they like to be scared a little from time to time; that’s why they like to tell each other ghost stories, the more ghoulish the better, and why they run with lolling tongues toward anything that promises them a little vicarious blood and gore. The early twentieth century humorist Ogden Nash nailed it when he titled one of his poems “Don’t Cry, Darling, It’s Blood All Right.”
Traditional fairy tales delighted countless generations of children for three good and sufficient reasons.
First of all, they’re packed full of wonderful events.
Second, they’re positively dripping with gore, which as already noted is an instant attraction to any self-respecting child.
Third, they’ve got a moral—which means, again, that they are about consequences.
The selfish, cruel, and stupid characters don’t get patted on the head, given the same prize as everyone else, and shielded from the results of their selfishness, cruelty, and stupidity; instead, they get gobbled up by monsters, turned to stone by witches’ curses, or subjected to some other suitably grisly doom. It’s the characters who are honest, brave, and kind who go on to become King or Queen of Everywhere.
Such things are utterly unacceptable, according to the approved child-rearing notions of our day.
Ask why this should be the case and you can count on being told that expecting a child to have to deal with the consequences of its actions decreases it’s self-esteem. No doubt that’s true, but this is another of those many cases where people in our society manage not to notice that the opposite of one bad thing is usually another bad thing.
Is there such a thing as too little self-esteem?
Of course—but there is also such a thing as too much self-esteem. In fact, we have a common and convenient English word for somebody who has too much self-esteem. That word is “jerk.”
The cult of self-esteem in contemporary pop psychology has thus produced a bumper crop of jerks in today’s America. I’m thinking here, among many other examples, of the woman who made the news a little while back by strolling right past the boarding desk at an airport, going down the ramp, and taking her seat on the airplane ahead of all the other passengers, just because she felt she was entitled to do so.
When the cabin crew asked her to leave and wait her turn like everyone else, she ignored them; security was called, and she ignored them, too.
They finally had to drag her down the aisle and up the ramp like a sack of potatoes, and hand her over to the police. I’m pleased to say she’s up on charges now.
That woman had tremendous self-esteem. She esteemed herself so highly that she was convinced that the rules that applied to everyone else surely couldn’t apply to her—and that’s normally the kind of attitude you can count on from someone whose self-esteem has gone up into the toxic-overdose range.
Yet the touchstone of excessive self-esteem, the gold standard of jerkdom, is the complete unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that actions have consequences and you might have to deal with those, whether you want to or not.
That sort of thing is stunningly common in today’s society. It was that kind of overinflated self-esteem that convinced affluent liberals in the United States and Europe that they could spend thirty years backing policies that pandered to their interests while slamming working people face first into the gravel, without ever having to deal with the kind of blowback that arrived so dramatically in the year just past.
Now Britain is on its way out of the European Union, Donald Trump is mailing invitations to his inaugural ball, and the blowback’s not finished yet.
Try to point this out to the people whose choices made that blowback inevitable, though, and if my experience is anything to go by, you’ll be ignored if you’re not shouted down.
On an even greater scale, of course, there’s the conviction on the part of an astonishing number of people that we can keep on treating this planet as a combination cookie jar to raid and garbage bin to dump wastes in, and never have to deal with the consequences of that appallingly shortsighted set of policies.
That’s as true in large swathes of the allegedly green end of things, by the way, as it is among the loudest proponents of smokestacks and strip mines.
I’ve long since lost track of the number of people
I’ve met who insist loudly on how much they love the Earth and how urgent it is that “we” protect the environment, but who aren’t willing to make a single meaningful change in their own personal consumption of resources and production of pollutants to help that happen.
Consequences don’t go away just because we don’t want to deal with them. That lesson is being taught right now on low-lying seacoasts around the world, where streets that used to be well above the high tide line reliably flood with seawater when a high tide meets an onshore wind.
It’s being taught on the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica, which are moving with a decidedly un-glacial rapidity through a trajectory of collapse that hasn’t been seen since the end of the last ice age
I’s being taught in a hundred half-noticed corners of an increasingly dysfunctional global economy, as the externalized costs of technological progress pile up unnoticed and drag economic activity to a halt.
And of course it’s being taught, as already noted, in the capitals of the industrial world, where the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last thirty years is reeling under the blows of a furious populist backlash.
It didn’t have to be learned that way.
We could have learned it from Krampus or the old Santa Claus, the one who was entirely willing to leave a badly behaved child’s stocking empty on Christmas morning except for that single eloquent lump of coal.
We could have learned it from the fairy tales that taught generations of children that consequences matter; we could have learned it from any number of other sources, given a little less single-minded a fixation on maximizing self-esteem right past the red line on the meter—but enough of us didn’t learn it that way, and so here we are.
I’d therefore like to encourage those of my readers who have young children in their lives to consider going out and picking up a good old-fashioned collection of fairy tales, by Charles Perrault or the Brothers Grimm, and use those in place of the latest mass-marketed consequence-free pap when it comes to storytelling time.
The children will thank you for it, and so will everyone who has to deal with them in their adult lives.
Come to think of it, those of my readers who don’t happen to have young children in their lives might consider doing the same thing for their own benefit, restocking their imaginations with cannibal giants and the other distinctly unmodern conveniences thereof, and benefiting accordingly.
And if, dear reader, you are ever tempted to climb into the lap of the universe and demand that it fork over a long list of goodies, and you glance up expecting to see the jolly and long-suffering face of Santa Claus beaming down at you, don’t be too surprised if you end up staring in horror at the leering yellow eyes and lolling tongue of Krampus instead, as he ponders whether you’ve earned a thrashing with the birch switch or a ride in the wicker basket.
Or perhaps the great furry face of the Solstice bear, the beast of Alban Arthuan, as she blinks myopically at you for a moment before she either shoves you from her lap with one powerful paw, or tears your arm off and gnaws on it meditatively while you bleed to death on the cold, cold ground.
Because the universe doesn’t care what you think you deserve.
It really doesn’t—and, by the way, the willingness of your fellow human beings to take your wants and needs into account will by and large be precisely measured by your willingness to do the same for them.
And on that utterly seasonal note, I wish all my fellow Druids a wonderful solstice; all my Christian friends and readers, a very merry Christmas; and all my readers, whatever their faith or lack thereof, a rekindling of light, hope, and sanity in a dark and troubled time.
Yet another United Nations climate confab is about to commence, this time in Paris, France, where the tragic backdrop of terrorism, war, and a growing immigration crisis now grips the country.
Still, we’re unlikely to see a plan emerge from the Paris talks that truly stems the tide of rising carbon pollution, much less any binding agreement to ensure that meaningful climate protection goals are met.
Those who’ve pinned their hopes on a global accord that ramps down carbon levels are singing from the same songbook as they always have, year after year, from Rio in 1992 to Kyoto in 1997 to Copenhagen in 2009.
Time and time again the refrain is always: “It will be different this time.”
Environmental commentator Brian Tokar has outlined each of these progressive failures in his painfully incisive piece, Is the Paris Climate Conference Designed to Fail?
With excruciating detail, Tokar provides a behind-the-scenes look into why these global processes have perpetually missed the mark, concluding that “progress toward a meaningful climate agreement has continued to be stifled by big-power politics and diplomatic gridlock.”
That appears unlikely to change anytime soon, certainly not in the 20-30 year timeframe that climate activists proclaim is critical to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels to stave off massive climate disruption.
Recent news from climate scientists isn’t encouraging.
Earlier this month, the World Meteorological Association (WMO) released a bulletin noting that the Earth’s climate will soon enter a new “permanent reality” when concentrations of atmospheric CO2 are almost certain to pass 400 parts per million (PPM) — already 50 units higher than the 350 PPM ‘safe’ threshold advocated by climate scientists and activists alike. “It means hotter global temperatures, more extreme weather events like heatwaves and floods, melting ice, rising sea levels and increased acidity of the oceans.
This is happening now and we are moving into uncharted territory at a frightening speed,” said WMO Secretary General Michel Jarraud.
In the United States alone, a 3-meter sea level rise would inundate many of the East Coast’s largest cities, including huge metroplexes like Boston, Miami, and New York.
And that’s just a sampling of the climate impacts that are already in the cards. Even if we look optimistically at what we can expect a global agreement to achieve, there’s simply no way it will stave off massive climate disruption.
Independent researchers at Climate Action Tracker project a global temperature rise between 2.2°C and 3.4°C by 2100 if all current country-by-country pledges are fully implemented (emphasis mine).
Those who are still committed to making the most of the UN talks in Paris, to push global leaders to ratify the boldest, most equitable climate agreement possible, deserve enormous praise and respect. May their efforts bear fruit, in spite of the odds.
But given all the well-established impacts of the pollution that has already happened — let alone all the gigatons of carbon and methane releases to come — it’s simply irresponsible not to refocus our efforts on preparing for the worst.
And even that figure sounds woefully inadequate when the costs of shifting from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based entirely on renewables are factored in — roughly $60 trillion to maintain current world per-capita energy use, or $150 trillion to achieve European per-capita energy use, according to Searching for a Miracle, a joint study by the International Forum on Globalization and the Post Carbon Institute.
The UN climate negotiations thus far have settled on a goal of just $100 billion annually in adaptation financing — a mere fraction of what’s needed to truly prepare communities for what’s coming.
Of course, were we to downscale our overall energy demand, opt for radical conservation measures, phase out private automobile use, relocalize our economies, and shift our food system away from animal agriculture — then modern society’s energy requirements would be far less than they are now, our lives would be far more fulfilling, healthy, and connected, and our impact on the climate would be drastically reduced.
And rather than scramble in vain to maintain unsustainable levels of consumption — albeit through supposed “green” technologies, nearly all of which require extensive fossil fuels and toxic chemicals to produce — we could instead focus on bracing our communities for climate change’s inevitable impacts, simplifying our infrastructure, and moving population centers away from rising waters.
Unfortunately, in terms of overall investments and socioeconomic trends, we’re doing precisely the opposite: building more and more energy-intensive infrastructure, sprawling networks of roads and highways, vaster trade routes and shipping fleets, and ever-larger cattle, pig, poultry, and fish production facilities.
Still, while global climate talks and dominant trends are falling far short, a rising tide of local actions around the world to push governments, institutions, and communities toward climate sanity are providing a glimmer of hope for the future. To name but a few noteworthy developments:
The province of Alberta, Canada just introduced a far-reaching climate protection strategy that includes a tax on carbon, an unprecedented cap on oilsands emissions, and a phase-out of coal-fired electricity with an emphasis on replacement by wind power. The carbon tax is expected to raise $3 billion a year, which will be reinvested in renewable energy sectors and cover increased costs to consumers. A portion of the revenues will also be invested in truly green infrastructure like public transit systems, along with programs to help Albertans reduce their energy use. Other revenues will help individuals and families make ends meet and provide transitional financial assistance to small businesses, First Nations and people working in affected coal facilities. It’s smart policy on all fronts, and has real economic teeth.
And in the United States, a blossoming climate justice movement scored a phenomenal victory earlier this month when the Obama Administration finally rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline. A powerful coalition of Tribal Nations, farmers and ranchers, climate scientists, college students, trade unionists, renewable energy advocates, nurses and everyday citizens forced this fossil fuel boondoggle into the national spotlight over the past six years, and relentlessly dogged decision-makers every step of the way to ensure that the project eventually suffered a well-deserved defeat. Similar tireless activism has led to dozens of successful campaigns around the country to shut down fracking wells, stop new coal export facilities, and encourage major funds to divest from fossil fuels.
On the weekend of November 28-29, the Global Climate March will take place in hundreds of cities around the world to coincide with the start of the Paris talks. The breadth and tenacity of the global climate movement has already made impressive strides, having forced governments to take bolder stances than they clearly would have otherwise, and shifting popular consciousness largely away from the deniers and diminishers of our day.
But the vital task of shifting trillions away from fossil fueled infrastructure, oil wars, and wasteful consumption toward a just, regenerative, balanced way of life for us all remains the most critical unfinished challenge of our time. It’s too late to “save” the climate as we know it, but it’s not too late to save ourselves.
If we can face the gathering storms, the rising seas, and the social turmoil that’s coming with honesty, humility, and boldness, we may just make it to the other side.
How that “other side” shapes up is still largely up to us, depending on whether we continue to squander this planet’s abundant natural wealth or harness its remaining bounty toward a life-affirming future. The costs of fossil fuels on our world have been staggering, to be sure, to our health, to our communities, and to the biosphere at-large.
But whether by design or some fantastical quirk of geological fortune, the endgame is nigh for fossil fueled industrialism. The mad dash for more, more, more into the furthest, most remote corners of the globe will eventually fade into distant memory, replaced with cultures and economies that flow with the rhythms of sunlight, water, and wind.
Why not get started with the exciting work of recalibrating ourselves to the natural cadence of life on Earth?
If you have been watching this website for any length of time you know how we feel about "collapse". It's here, ongoing and accelerating.
There have been several recent newsworthy stories that underline this process and how our continued obliviousness to the situation exacerbates the problems we will face when the decay and disintegration of the regime reach us full-on.
Below are seven examples of what I am calling "smoke signals" that were found in articles I've read in the last day or two. They are about economic collapse and climate change.
Frankly, I do not understand how "main stream media", corporate "flaks" and government "spokespeople" can keep a lid on a revolt from those left below decks in steerage as the bulkheads of this "civilization" fail. I guess it's because "the band plays on" in the form of cable TV, internet access and great cellular reception.
Many Americans won't notice that the music has stopped until Spotify goes silent or there is no Social Security/Unemployment/Pension Fund/or Pell Grant deposit in their checking account.
Smoke Signals
China and the New World Disorder enter very powerful deflationary depression
Deflation and depression are mutually reinforcing, meaning the downward spiral will continue for many years. We have been warning about this dynamic since 2008, and have already seen the liquidity crunch start to play out in many parts of the world. Once it hits critical mass, and it can do so very quickly, momentum will increase greatly. (http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/08/china-and-the-new-world-disorder/)
Greek Stocks, Economy Collapse, Suffer Worst Declines In History
As we noted last week, there may be no modern economy left in Greece by the time this is all over as many Greeks have already reverted to the barter system in an effort to grease the wheels of commerce and skirt the frozen banking system. (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-08-03/greek-stocks-economy-collapse-suffer-worst-declines-history)
Puerto Rico in Economic Death Spiral just Defaulted for the First Time
The default is a historic moment in Puerto Rico's economic "death spiral," a term the island's governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, has used. The island is struggling with about $70 billion in total outstanding debt, and its economy is in recession. (http://money.cnn.com/2015/08/03/investing/puerto-rico-default/)
Earth’s Most Famous Climate Scientist Issues Bombshell Sea Level Warning
The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in their fields—concludes that glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica will melt 10 times faster than previous consensus estimates, resulting in sea level rise of at least 10 feet in as little as 50 years. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/sea_level_study_james_hansen_issues_dire_climate_warning.html)
Global Glaciers Melting up to Three Times Rate of 20th Century
"The observed glaciers currently lose between half a meter and one meter of its ice thickness every year—this is two to three times more than the corresponding average of the 20th century," explained Michael Zemp, lead author of the study and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, in a press statement about the report. (http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/08/04/global-glaciers-melting-three-times-rate-20th-century)
Appropriate Responses
Okay, okay - you too smell the smoke and you have been getting yourself ready for a New Word Order for some time. Well now is the time to expect some acceleration of events. As we go into this autumn there is likely to be a "discontinuity" of some sort: A misstep in the Ukraine or Syria; a mistake in the South China Sea or North Korea - something not all together unexpected but a surprise anyway. This event could also be expressed in terrorism on US soil, urban riots or even turning on immigrants.
My advise is don't be fooled. Don't get your undies in a bunch just because Fox News goes ballistic, or you're asked to show solidarity. The system will be playing the public like a violin. They did it for 911 and we danced to the tune. The corn-pone Nazis will be out of the closet and seeking your support. Donald Trump is one and reminds me of Benito Mussolini - the man who lead the Italians into Fascism. Like Benito, the Donald is only the Clown Prince until the real villains take over.
Moreover, playing with the "liberals" like Hillary Clinton or "socialists" like Bernie Sanders is likely to be unproductive if they are seeking to reestablish the "Good Old Days" - when every head of household expected good job with decent wages and a pension. It was never quite that way and it will never be remotely like that again. In the future social justice is going to be all together different than what we expect.
In the new social order we will all be Greeks, and Syrians, and Nigerians. We will all be Mexicans and blacks and immigrants and nomads.
Keep your head down, your nose clean and your hands busy! Get used to it and thrive! .
According to boxer Mike Tyson, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Industrial civilization punched the planet in the face, repeatedly. We wonder why Earth isn’t the same planet with which we grew up. We offer apologies, including recycling and hybrid automobiles, but we’re unwilling — as a society — to pursue substantive change.
And now it’s too late. Earth is done with humans. We’re walking around to save money on funeral expenses.
My response: Pursue what you love. Pursue a life of excellence. Throw off the cultural shackles. All of ‘em.
We’re all in hospice now. Let’s give freely of our time, wisdom, and material possessions. Let’s throw ourselves into humanity and the living planet. Let’s act with compassion and courage. Let’s endow ourselves with dignity. Even if all the data and forecasts are incorrect, even if Earth can support infinite growth on a finite planet with no adverse consequences, please convince me there is a better way to live.
And let’s not forget the immortal words of writer Edward Abbey: “Action is the antidote to despair.” After all, I am not now suggesting, nor have I ever suggested, giving up. Our insignificant lives have never been about us. They’re about the shards of the living planet we leave in our wake. As pointed out by Desmond Tutu, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
Anybody can cheer for winners. Essentially everybody I know sits on the sidelines cheering the favorites. I’m proposing we stop sitting on the sidelines. I’m proposing we get to work on behalf the underdogs. I’m proposing we start working to save the living planet. I’m proposing we start by dismantling industrial civilization.
Is there a better metric of a person’s character than how she treats those who can do nothing for her? Let’s treat others with respect as we leave this mortal coil. Let’s extend the concept of “other” to humans within non-industrial cultures. Let’s extend the concept further, to non-human species. You might think they’ve been doing nothing for us, but they’ve been providing for our own existence. Let’s return the favor.
Are you ready to enhance your self-reliance?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to step beyond the violence and destruction of mainstream culture?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to move away from a system that is destroying all life on Earth?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to prepare for the end of industrial civilization?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to secure your own clean water and healthy food?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to secure your body temperature at a safe level, year-around?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to serve your local human community?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to serve your local plant and animal communities?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
Are you ready to live in the moment, where you live, fully appreciating the natural world?
If so, you’re ready for The Next Step.
I stepped away from industrial civilization five years ago. I welcome you to join me.
I have been a pretty aware collapsitarian most of my life. I’m 51 and can remember watching films about jungles and oceans and all manner of eco-system topics in elementary school wondering why every film we watched had to end with a warning that if we didn’t watch our step humanity was going to destroy too much habitat for these natural beings to survive. It made me sad. Also, at that time, the population had hit 4 billion. Projected on the news and in school was that by the year 2000 we would hit close to 6 billion.
As a child, I always found that mind boggling and never really thought I’d live to see the day. Of course, at the same time, I’m still pissed I didn’t get to live like the Jetsons when we hit the year 2000. We had to fight them terrorists instead, cuz they was cummin’ fer us. Meanwhile we heard nothing about a concept called blowback.
Anyone remember the commercial about pollution where the Native American in a canoe was paddling down the river past factories belching out smoke, the river itself clogged with trash and pollution? In the last scene there was a close up of him with a tear in his eye? That has always stuck with me. I think then it was called Project SOAR (Save Our American Resources).
My dream as a kid was to be a marine biologist. I always had aquariums growing up. I did fresh water, pond water set ups, marine and reef. I loved that like I can’t describe. It sounds funny but as a middle school and high school student I learned about environmental poisoning from those aquariums.
An imbalance, particularly in population, unless the outside god-force (the aquarium keeper) kept the toxins at bay, the system would quickly acidify and crash the tank. I remember thinking that with all of our cars (I grew up in the Detroit area), and all of these people, weren’t we doing the same thing?
After all, for all intents and purposes the earth is a closed system. The toxins are building, and there is no aquarium keeper removing the poison. In fact, the self-appointed, superior being in the aquarium, was going out of its way to create the poisons!
I have always loathed cities. To me they are the keeper of the sheep. As I tend to be kind of a bull in a china shop, I discovered first hand, through an encounter with a girlfriend’s father, just how vociferously citiots will defend the purity and sanctity of cities.
On a ride he gave me back from their house one evening just before going off to college, I made one comment too many about how cities don’t feed people and that they were responsible for most of our ills (I was 17). Completely clueless as to what that meant he went off on me like a mad patriarch.
Good thing I was raised by one, so I didn’t hesitate to stand my ground. He was red in the face pissed just like a Tea Partier screaming “don’t you love your country? What you do you mean cities don’t feed people!? Why don’t you just SHUT UP!”
I’ve lived on and worked by, the Great Lakes, lived on the high plains, the desert and in the high back country of the Rocky Mountains, and I have watched all of it over the course of my life, decline. Global Climate change came as no surprise to me. I have since given up trying to preach about the issue. No one who doesn’t want to hear will hear. Some may wake up, but watch the brouhaha that will happen when the mass of urban humanity wakes up violently when it is even more too late than today.
I have this image of myself in my dreams, sitting up high on a mesa on the western slope of Colorado filming the mass migration coming from California after the last denier uses the last drop of fresh water to irrigate his or her front lawn; Millions of people leaving their dead “paradise” thinking that anyone else could possibly want them in their backyard.
Because of growing up in abuse, I’ve learned to simply walk away if the voice inside of me says, “Get the hell away.” I listen to the voice that says, “Danger, danger, Will Robinson”. People entrenched in their deluded mentally constructed worlds are very dangerous.
I became involved in the homesteading movement when I learned more about our food system. Having roots in Iowa, and “vacationing” there growing up, I watched our farms that had kitchen gardens, pigs, chickens, cows, and usually several different kinds of grains, turn into fields of mono-crops.
Again, the aquarium hobby related. Spraying and pumping out diesel exhaust producing more and more toxins, farmers going broke and being kicked off the land, no family farms, nothing but fields of feed corn.
I received a Master’s Degree in a seminary during the peak of the farm crisis. I also worked with ranchers in the high country at the same time. That changed me. I went from being involved in the “what” of the issues, to the suffering being caused “by” the issues. I watched, like many of you, as thousands of farmers were forced off the land by the green revolution.
I presided over a funeral where the deceased, having lost precious ranch land due to a bankruptcy, and who lost his wife at the same time through a divorce, drove down a canyon, tried to persuade her to come back, when rejected stopped at a liquor store and on the way home, unloaded a shotgun into his face. This was during a time when Colorado was seeing huge increases in the development of feedlots and plummeting beef prices.
Our capitalist system of greed has completely run over and destroyed the humanity of being human. Industrial civilization has put in place the proper infrastructure — essentially since WWII — necessary to keep us in our places, to commodify everything, including the people whom the system is supposed to serve, and built the most horrific monolithic consumption machine our Patriarchal masters could envision.
The colossus has taken a life of its own. It is too big to control, and any glitch in the machine will mean its catastrophic collapse and with it, the demise of us all. Even in the best scenario, even if the system didn’t collapse, we will slowly and painfully die off because our habitat — the aquarium — will be rendered all used up and not fit for life.
I wanted to say at this point that I don’t think that humanity is good at heart. But pondering that more I think that is wrong. I think that un-awakened people are not good at heart. I think that portions of our society (namely the patriarchs that built the industrial civilization colossus and convinced us of its virtues) are seriously, mentally ill.
But because of the power they derived from their sociopathy, we have come to admire and emulate them as it being a virtue. I don’t think life among humans is exceptionally beautiful, however. I think too many put on a face or an act — be it the positive psychology movement, spirituality, fundamentalism and being saved — and try to convince themselves that it is. In my world, that is simply delusional. Nature is beautiful, humanity destroyed it. It’s too late, it’s too far gone.
The time to resist was yesterday. The filters on the aquarium can’t keep up and there is no one to change them out and keep the system clean and inhabitable. After all, the temperature rises and the chaos in the weather patterns we see today, are happening because of emissions put into the atmosphere 40 YEARS AGO!!
Imagine 40 years hence! In practically every human encounter in my life with people in supposed positions of power (parents, employers, religious leaders, etc.), I have always met with abuse coming from a patriarchal mindset seeking to control others so the ego can retain its existence. That is the poison that eats us as a species daily. That is why this will not and cannot change.
As a result of all of this, the fish are swimming upside down, and quite literally, the sea stars are melting. Now it is the time to simply live, or not live. Death is death no matter when or how. Can you not justify suicide today? Why would ethics today forbid it? Why would we even care? There is no purpose on this planet save to have lived. Our insanity destroyed the playground. 51 years of hell. Kurt Cobain sang to the effect: “All we are is all alone” …. He wasn’t wrong.
Abuse of me, abuse of the poor, abuse of women, genocide, the abuse of the land base, abuse of diversity… A total culture and societal structure based on fear and abuse has led us to the brink. “What a long strange trip it’s been.” This is not the mark of a sane and intelligent species. It is more akin to a bacterium in a petri dish on the verge of catastrophic collapse.
Blindly consuming its food source (or in our case, energy source), with no thought to its ultimate consequence it will unconsciously run right off a cliff. One big difference though, is that we created religion and a manifest destiny to help lock us into this death spiral in the name of our vast delusional superiority.
The last stage of grief is acceptance. I lived through all of the different stages of the grief process from about the age of 10. In fact, so much of my life could simply be a long drawn out sense of realizing that, as the song from YES goes, “This life’s not for living, it’s for fighting and for wars.
No matter what the truth is, hold on to what is yours…” When one tries to live a life of altruism and compassion, and the whole of your species spits back into your face, you stand on the outside looking in, seeing the ridiculousness for what it is.
Eventually, you become a different person. The rage (which I have been full of most of my life) subsides, you detach, and you become quiet. You see it all as a mirage. As it has become worse and the futility realized… I have become… quiet.
I got into the homestead movement, because I still thought that living as an example would help to save the world. I worked brutal hours; first turning a suburban home into a Dervaes style urban farm, and then building our JAZ Farm.
I was hoping, like Dr. McPherson, that if I really showed the world how one could live with comfort, dignity, and harmony with nature, that everyone would enthusiastically follow me down the yellow brick road, dancing to the tune of the Pied Piper (to mix my story lines a tad).
Most of the response has been incredulous. Of course, my friends and family think it is great, but for acquaintances that are not as close, most of it was, like the sound-bites in the media, a flash in the pan. “Oh that is so cool, I really wish I could do something like that”, they’d say, and then it would fade. Invitations to come and help are met with excuses.
Now I hope it is simply my hobby farm with my few enthusiastic friends who do get it. Seeing it for the life line it can be for us, if we simply do the work.
So while I have never really had to get to the point of acceptance over the finitude of the human dilemma (we are all going to die it’s simply a matter of when and how), I had to grieve over the futility of my efforts to really make a difference.
Somehow, like I am sure with Guy, and my permaculture friends, and my doomer friends, and those who simply want to scream from the rooftops, we wanted to do something to make a difference.
Chris Hedges commented about his activism that he wasn’t necessarily protesting against and calling out fascists thinking he was going to defeat them, but simply because they are fascists.
A greater description of acceptance is hard to find. As Richard the Lionheart said to his brother Jeffery in The Lion in Winter, “When the fall is all there is… how you fall matters.” Acceptance. Personal meaning in the face of futility. “All alone, is all we are.”
The grief came from having to accept the fact that my dream of bringing the world around is dead. When you come from a helping profession, awakening to the fact that you can’t do anything of substance to turn the Titanic and knowing it is going to sink no matter what you do, is the experiencing of a death.
It is the death of a purpose. It is the death of who you thought you were. It is the acceptance of knowing you were right all along and not being able to take egoic pride in being so prescient. It is a loss of life; YOUR life. All that you ascribed meaning to, like a soap bubble…. Pop! Gone.
I went through this sense of futility and grief at the same time that I was building out the farm’s infrastructure. I found my sense of enthusiasm beginning to wane mostly out of a sense of futility. Physically, I am a pretty strong male (think big ass defensive lineman).
I also was able to summon up a tremendous amount of drive, mentally, to get me past the physical pain involved in getting things done. My self-imposed timelines were met and we are now on the verge of planting out over half an acre of organic vegetables. JAZ Farm lives.
Here is what happened to me during the acceptance phase. I lost the drive. I lost the mental toughness that drove me to work to exhaustion. Every time I told myself that I had to get my ass in gear to get this or that done, a little voice in the back of my head said, “Why?” “None of what you are doing matters.” “Who cares if the pig pen doesn’t get built?”
That little voice rendered me — to what I would have considered in my life about others — a sniveling, weak minded, wimp. I spent days staring at my navel, not caring what happened. I spent weeks in depression thinking that I so eagerly went about this quest and it now being for nothing.
My inner voice said, “The world is ending, humanity is mentally ill, and you my friend, just broke your body and turned your hips to dust, because you thought you were going to be the climate change messiah who led everyone to the promise land.” Grief: that person died. I have been holding vigil for him during the Polar Vortex winter of our discontent.
So from this depression came my previous two essays on NBL: Life is Different and What Is Your Calligraphy? Not because I wanted to continue my pontification, but like The President of the Galaxy in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” when looking for the answer to the great question and didn’t get it, said, “I think I did kind of a lot to get here…now I’m going to have to go figure out something else for my whole life to be about”.
My life lost its meaning. I had to figure it out. I think maybe I have. Short answer: There doesn’t have to be any meaning. In fact, searching for meaning may be synonymous with pain.
Ponder on this statement: “Nothing really matters, and then again, so what if it did?”
What really matters? If you sit down right now and ask yourself that, you may come up with something that your whole life can be about after you have come to see that what you thought you were going to be has died. Resurrect yourself like the Phoenix. How does one answer the question, “Who Am I?”
I found that the answer to that question was quite simple: No one. The world is too big and the damage so deep that I realized that I am no one. I am not the climate change, pure living, watch me and emulate me and change the world with me messiah. Maybe I am still Morpheus, getting people to take the red pill and then not getting invited to parties anymore. Fine.
But if not…. fine! You are not your life. You are the eyes that the earth sprouted to look around with for awhile. The end. As I once heard a fellow astronomer say, “If you just leave Hydrogen and a little Lithium alone for long enough, it will eventually sing opera.”
The farm is still mine and the love of growing and harmony with nature is still in my blood and bones. It simply doesn’t have to be the bright light shining on a hill any longer. In fact, given the impending mass migration from the desert southwest, perhaps some anonymity isn’t a bad thing.
A wonderful friend uses the phrase: Ima grow food ‘til I can’t. To which I morphed that into “I’m going to plant ‘til I can’t”. It is a theme that awaits you on the other side of grief: That all there is in life, really, is just you being conscious. The only thing you can say about this existence is “I am”. That’s it. There is nothing else.
So what do you do?
I can say that for me, it is going through a conscious walking away from my species. While I share the same physical shape and needs, I don’t identify with the un-awakened creatures that have infested this place, largely only using their lizard brain. It is a mental evolution, a passing through the thin membrane between living in industrial civilization and trying to shake that sticky filth off.
It is the final scene in a movie when the main character looks back on his home, his city, his country — in this case — his species, then rights himself in the saddle and slowly rides into the gray mist, never looking back, knowing that leaving is a death, and continuing to ride away, is rebirth.
In the past year, I mentally sat myself into the saddle. I am riding into the mist. I have left a life behind that says, “You need to be an activist. You MUST be involved! If you aren’t part of the solution you are part of the problem, and all that tripe.” I have watched that part of me die. I have grieved that I couldn’t have helped more. But it is dead. I am not looking back over my shoulder thinking that maybe I could just go back. Go do a little bit more.
Others may take that path because of course, fascists are fascist, and maybe some find them a fun prey to hunt. Whatever works for them. Acceptance is an understanding and internalizing of the futility of it all; that you are only really doing it … for yourself. “I’m going to plant ‘til I can’t” If people want to be involved, ok. If not, ok too. My species is beyond help because of the power elite.
All I can do is do something I love; that feels spiritual and meaningful – even if it isn’t. For me, it means loving the metamorphosis of seeds and the peace of farm animals. It won’t save the world, but it will keep me from committing suicide. The illness of humanity is too great for me to do anything about. It is simply too big.
Others will say, “That if we all work together then….”, “There is a great awakening coming and we’ll all ascend together” and of course, “People like you are the problem,” “Oh you’ve just given up so I guess the oppressors win,” etc, etc,etc. The mysterious rider slowly rides into the sunset. He fades into the Nexus, awakens from the Matrix and goes on to do….?
Nothing in particular. I’ll probably just keep chopping wood and carrying water, collecting eggs, and Plant ‘til I Can’t.
This idea of "Attitude During Collapse" clashes severely with the narcissistic, human-centered, human supremacist beliefs so rampant in our society today: any humans who survive the economic, social, ecological, peak oil, global warming, and nuclear collapses, now well in progress, must ultimately live within the energy limits of daily sunlight while sharing that sunlight with millions of other species.
With this idea severe internal clashes often occur within people on at least two fronts.
First, “Collapses? What collapses? There is no economic, social, or ecological collapse! We have plenty of oil and other fossil fuels. And certainly there are no global warming or nuclear-related collapses!” Second, “Humans must live within the energy limits of daily sunlight while sharing it? You mean like primitive Stone Age people did?! That is ridiculous! We cannot and will not go back!” (said as if we have some choice about this).
In this short essay I will not attempt to change anyone’s thinking about these issues that come directly from a number of irrational beliefs related to human superiority and civilizational “progress.”
Here, I start with the assumption that the reader understands and accepts that these now global scale and interrelated collapse processes threaten the continuing viability of our species along with so many others.
I assume that the reader accepts that in the long term if any humans survive — and most likely very few, if any, will — because of biological ecosystem energy and other constraints they will have to live within the limits of the daily sunlight within their local geographic area, dramatically unlike the way so many humans live today. For fundamental biological reasons, any surviving humans will eventually have to live in the wild at a Stone Age level of technology.
Assuming that a person has reached this point in their thinking, what skill has the most importance in adapting to collapse and learning to live in the wild?
I would like to suggest that attitude does. What one thinks, the appraisals that they make of their situation, proves critically important. But how can we help ourselves and others learn to find old, unhelpful, habitual ways of thinking that cause us trouble and replace this thinking with more effective thinking, with more effective beliefs?
Unfortunately, we teach and learn these things only with great difficulty. Even so, our thinking habits, our mental attitude, largely determine whether we will find learning and adapting to collapse and a living in the wild situation painful, debilitating, and uncomfortable experience, or a relaxing and invigorating one.
Two people with the same physical makeup, the same knowledge, and the same skills for adapting to collapse or living in the wild can view the same situation in two quite different ways; thus, they will have two entirely different experiences.
If one views the situation with contempt, fear, and negativity then they will live and experience that, but if they view the situation with a positive frame of mind, then they will have more positive results and experiences.
What does “a positive frame of mind” mean? I mean for it to refer to existential courage. Meanwhile, a vast difference exists between what we commonly know today as “positive thinking” and existential courage.
The habit of positive thinking, an optimistic bias, undermines preparedness and invites disaster. This paragraph from Barbara Ehrenreich’s wonderful, must-read book, Bright-Sided, How Positive Thinking Is UNDERMINING America (2009) emphasizes this point:
But if early capitalism was inhospitable to positive thinking, “late” capitalism, or consumer capitalism, is far more congenial, depending as it does on the individual’s hunger for more and the firms’ imperative for growth. The consumer culture encourages individuals to want more — cars, larger homes, television sets, cell phones, gadgets of all kinds — and positive thinking is ready at hand to tell them they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it.
Meanwhile, in a competitive business world, the companies that manufacture these goods and provide the paychecks that purchase them have no alternative but to grow. If you don’t steadily increase market share and profits, you risk being driven out of business or swallowed by a larger enterprise. Perpetual growth, whether of a particular company or an entire economy, is of course an absurdity, but positive thinking makes it seem possible, if not ordained.
The perfection of certain skills forms the basis for the existential courage that I refer to, not what most people so often think of today as “positive thinking”.
When one perfects the needed thinking and behavioral skills, the person coping with collapse and learning to live in the wild has a significantly easier and more comfortable time. This in itself builds confidence and subsequently more existential courage.
Conversely haphazard and ineffective skills build negative appraisals and reduce courage while the ever-so-popular positive thinking produces out of touch with reality denial often accompanied by self-blame.
We need to build reality-based adaptive attitudes (the things we think and believe) along with skills related to the things we do. Each reinforces the other. Having done this, people will no longer start from a place of negativity and lack, but instead come from a place of confidence and skill.
One of my favorite quotes, by Carl Sagan, relates directly to this:
“It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
Much more influences mental attitude than just physical skills and their perfection. First, people must realize that they have control of their environment.
Certainly the weather, topography, and many other conditions remain beyond our control, but ultimately we each have the ability — or responsibility — to control much that relates to our coping with collapse, living in the wild, comfort, and capacity to change.
Second, we must realize they we have a choice — a choice to make things better or allow them to remain the same. It remains up to each of us how we choose to view any given situation and what we choose to do about it. We need to know and remember that our attitude, itself, remains a matter of choice — and that an attitude that hurts us emotionally or practically amounts to a very poor choice indeed.
I think that one of the most important lessons related to coping with collapse and living in the wild involves people learning that they have choices.
Not only does this fit into the worlds of coping with collapse and living in the wild but it also applies to people’s presently more everyday lives.
People soon realize that in everything they do, think, say, or feel, the outcomes — certainly the emotional outcomes — depend largely on their own choices. It remains their choice to feel happy or sad, comfortable, or uncomfort¬able, to “pass” or to “fail.” They have the choice to take control of their responses and not remain passive victims of circumstances, including what other people may think, feel, say, or do.
• Bud Nye, who retired as a psychiatric nurse and from teaching high school physics, chemistry, and biology. He now works at learning and practicing permaculture, natural building, and living in the wild.
All life, all happiness, remains a series of choices. The invaluable benefit gained in realizing and remembering this involves the fact that with these choices there soon comes a deep belief in “the self”: that infinitely complex microbial community that comes from and connects with all other life on Earth.
People soon understand that many more things become possible — certainly not anything! — if they believe strongly enough in themselves and their choices. No greater basic lessons for a happy life exist than fundamental, basic mental attitudes, for once mastered all else comes much more easily.
One of the best ways to teach ourselves and others that we have control and choice involves rewording our everyday questions. When someone makes a statement that they feel cold, for example, we can ask why they choose to feel cold and what they can do about it. This way the responsibility becomes the individual’s and they need to make the choice to do something about the cold. If they still choose to feel cold and blame it on circumstances outside of the self, teach them that they have the choice and model for them what they can do about it.
As you build a fire, or shelter, or find or make better clothing, emphasize how you make conscious choices — choices to feel warm — to do something about the problem. You do not passively blame it on outside circumstances but take responsibility and choose to change things for the better.
It remains important also to teach ourselves and others that during a collapse or living in the wild situation, we would best learn to separate our wants from our needs. Show them that choosing to concentrate on wants will only make things worse, for we can never fulfill all our wants.
Teach them first to take care of their needs, and to appreciate all those things that help them to take care of those needs. In essence, help them not to concentrate on what they don’t have but to appreciate what they do have. In this same flow of thought, we can also help people understand that comfort exists in a relative way.
In other words, feeling comfortable all depends on what we think, believe, and choose.
For some true-life examples of the principles discussed here, just a few of many possible examples, read Endurance, Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, about Ernest Shackleton and his crew’s two-year survival in the Antarctic after ice crushed their ship Endurance.
And/or read Almost Too Late, The True Story of a Father and His Three Teenage Children Shipwrecked off the Coast of Alaska in Winter by Elmo Wortman. And/or read Shackleton’s Forgotten Men, The Untold Tale of an Antarctic Tragedy by Lennard Bickel about the Ross Sea party.
SUBHEAD: The Greek language had several words describing different kinds of love. Knowing them can change you. [IB Editor's note: HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! May you celebrate all these loves.]
Looking for an antidote to modern culture's emphasis on romantic love? Perhaps we can learn from the diverse forms of emotional attachment prized by the ancient Greeks.
Today's coffee culture has an incredibly sophisticated vocabulary. Do you want a cappuccino, an espresso, a skinny latte, or maybe an iced caramel macchiato?
The ancient Greeks were just as sophisticated in the way they talked about love, recognizing six different varieties. They would have been shocked by our crudeness in using a single word both to whisper "l love you" over a candlelit meal and to casually sign an email "lots of love."
So what were the six loves known to the Greeks?
And how can they inspire us to move beyond our current addiction to romantic love, which has 94 percent of young people hoping—but often failing—to find a unique soul mate who can satisfy all their emotional needs?
1. Eros, or sexual passion
The first kind of love was eros, named after the Greek god of fertility, and it represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. But the Greeks didn't always think of it as something positive, as we tend to do today. In fact, eros was viewed as a dangerous, fiery, and irrational form of love that could take hold of you and possess you—an attitude shared by many later spiritual thinkers, such as the Christian writer C.S. Lewis.
Eros involved a loss of control that frightened the Greeks. Which is odd, because losing control is precisely what many people now seek in a relationship. Don't we all hope to fall "madly" in love?
2. Philia, or deep friendship
The second variety of love was philia or friendship, which the Greeks valued far more than the base sexuality of eros. Philia concerned the deep comradely friendship that developed between brothers in arms who had fought side by side on the battlefield. It was about showing loyalty to your friends, sacrificing for them, as well as sharing your emotions with them. (Another kind of philia, sometimes called storge, embodied the love between parents and their children.)
We can all ask ourselves how much of this comradely philia we have in our lives. It's an important question in an age when we attempt to amass "friends" on Facebook or "followers" on Twitter—achievements that would have hardly impressed the Greeks.
3. Ludus, or playful love
This was the Greeks' idea of playful love, which referred to the affection between children or young lovers. We've all had a taste of it in the flirting and teasing in the early stages of a relationship. But we also live out our ludus when we sit around in a bar bantering and laughing with friends, or when we go out dancing.
Dancing with strangers may be the ultimate ludic activity, almost a playful substitute for sex itself. Social norms may frown on this kind of adult frivolity, but a little more ludus might be just what we need to spice up our love lives.
4. Agape, or love for everyone
The fourth love, and perhaps the most radical, was agape or selfless love. This was a love that you extended to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. Agape was later translated into Latin as caritas, which is the origin of our word "charity."
C.S. Lewis referred to it as "gift love," the highest form of Christian love. But it also appears in other religious traditions, such as the idea of mettā or "universal loving kindness" in Theravāda Buddhism.
There is growing evidence that agape is in a dangerous decline in many countries. Empathy levels in the U.S. have declined sharply over the past 40 years, with the steepest fall occurring in the past decade. We urgently need to revive our capacity to care about strangers.
5. Pragma, or longstanding love
Another Greek love was the mature love known as pragma. This was the deep understanding that developed between long-married couples.
Pragma was about making compromises to help the relationship work over time, and showing patience and tolerance.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that we expend too much energy on "falling in love" and need to learn more how to "stand in love." Pragma is precisely about standing in love—making an effort to give love rather than just receive it. With about a third of first marriages in the U.S. ending through divorce or separation in the first 10 years, the Greeks would surely think we should bring a serious dose of pragma into our relationships.
6. Philautia, or love of the self
The Greek's sixth variety of love was philautia or self-love. And the clever Greeks realized there were two types. One was an unhealthy variety associated with narcissism, where you became self-obsessed and focused on personal fame and fortune. A healthier version enhanced your wider capacity to love.
The idea was that if you like yourself and feel secure in yourself, you will have plenty of love to give others (as is reflected in the Buddhist-inspired concept of "self-compassion"). Or, as Aristotle put it, "All friendly feelings for others are an extension of a man's feelings for himself."
The ancient Greeks found diverse kinds of love in relationships with a wide range of people—friends, family, spouses, strangers, and even themselves. This contrasts with our typical focus on a single romantic relationship, where we hope to find all the different loves wrapped into a single person or soul mate. The message from the Greeks is to nurture the varieties of love and tap into its many sources. Don't just seek eros, but cultivate philia by spending more time with old friends, or develop ludus by dancing the night away.
Moreover, we should abandon our obsession with perfection. Don't expect your partner to offer you all the varieties of love, all of the time (with the danger that you may toss aside a partner who fails to live up to your desires). Recognize that a relationship may begin with plenty of eros and ludus, then evolve toward embodying more pragma or agape.
The diverse Greek system of loves can also provide consolation. By mapping out the extent to which all six loves are present in your life, you might discover you've got a lot more love than you had ever imagined—even if you feel an absence of a physical lover.
It's time we introduced the six varieties of Greek love into our everyday way of speaking and thinking. If the art of coffee deserves its own sophisticated vocabulary, then why not the art of love?
Image above: For centuries people had dug into the soft sandstone of Kinver Edge, in England, to create the famous cave houses. Occupancy was recorded in 1777 and in 1861 there were 11 cave dwellings. From (http://www.stourbridge.com/kinvcave.htm).
There’s a country path I walk often, near where I live, that borders the edge of a vineyard. There’s a place along this path where some grapevines escaped under and over the barbed wire vineyard fence and now grow wild. These escaped grapevines bravely rewilding themselves have something important to teach me – and all of us. I’m growing my relationship with them, to learn more deeply what it is.
This place I call home, Sonoma County, CA, is wildly beautiful. I feel fortunate to live here. Tourists flock to this place, especially in the summer, many drawn by the “romance of the wine country”. I understand the allure of this land – and the attraction to spending a day going from one vineyard tasting room to another.
But have you ever really looked closely at a vineyard? Land shaved bare of all growth (sometimes clearing groves of old redwood trees – but that’s another article). Posts with wire stretched between them cross picturesque rolling hills in military-like formation. Grapevines are tied to the posts and stretched along the wires, bound in uniform, rigid shapes (perhaps for easier maintenance and harvesting). It looks like a giant martial formation of crucified plant beings. (There’s an old vineyard I drive by sometimes, where the vines are not tied, but allowed to grow as they please. Trunks thick with years, they bend and twist, reach and curve, each growing into its own beautiful and unique shape – but that’s yet another article.)
I marvel at the escaped grapevines along the path close to my home, that have somehow found their way to their own process of rewilding themselves, perhaps called by some ancestral memory deep in their DNA to reach over and under the barbed wire fence, learning to grow again toward their own unique, natural shape.
Studying these vines I notice that even as they stretch into their new-found freedom to shape themselves, they remain tethered to the vineyard grapevines – bound by common, intertwined roots to their brethren still tied to poles on the other side of the fence.
I feel a kinship with these rewilding, edge-dwelling grapevines – a stretching to reclaim the freedom to shape oneself, a diligence and urgency to this process of rewilding, embracing the uncertainty of what shape will emerge, with no “how to” manual or guarantees of success.
There’s a reality to these feelings of kinship. Even as I stretch to vision what could arise beyond the crumbling of our Industrial Growth Society, and what ways I might shape myself to contribute to that great rebirthing, I am bound, in a thousand interconnected ways, to the old way of being, thinking and doing – just as surely as these escaped grapevines share intertwined roots and branches with the ones tied to poles on the other side of the barbed wire fence.
It may be impossible to free one’s self completely (physically, financially, psychologically etc). It may not even be desirable. We are tied in a thousand ways, both visible and hidden, to the civilization that birthed and shaped us. It may be these interconnections that allow the flow from those visioning and creating a future at our crumbling civilization’s edge to those who remain more firmly bound within our dominant culture.
As one very simple example, I need my computer, internet, phone (and the cash to pay for them, and a way to obtain that cash) to communicate in our civilization – to be able to enter into and contribute to the conversation about where we are, what the future may hold, and what we can meaningfully do. The lone survivalist in his mountain cabin with his subsistence garden, stash of canned beans and rifle limits his own ability to contribute to meaningful change.
“If everyone disenchanted with this culture decided to wander off into the lonesome wilderness, it would have absolutely no effect on its workings,” writes Miles Olson, in his book Unlearn-Rewild.
Yet we can also constrict our ability to contribute to meaningful change if we remain too deeply embedded within our consumer corporate culture. We may find our creativity diminished, our vision dimmed, our heartfelt work actually strengthening the culture we strive to transition away from and transform.
As Leonard Cohen sings in his song First We Take Manhattan, “They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within…”
It’s a balancing act, this dancing at our crumbling civilizations edge, discovering and creating the steps as we go, reaching for the new while tethered in a thousand ways to the old.
Each person finds their own location. It’s not a one-place-fits-all prescription. Some will find their place further in or further out. It’s all part of that edge zone where we create the new from the frayed edges of the old. The stuff of the crumbling becomes the clay out of which we construct the future.
“I think the most strategic place to be is on the fringes of this culture, in rural areas and at the edges of cities and towns. There one can interact with both civilization and wildness, dancing back and forth between both, feeding off the mass human energy and non-human energy…,” writes Miles Olson in Unlearn-Rewild, “What we need is to build autonomous spaces, to create havens where the tools and skills we are going to need can be developed, and this can happen anywhere. Actually, it needs to be happening everywhere.”
Throughout human history, new ideas and ways of being have arisen on the edge of a culture and gradually spread toward the center. Christianity began as a cult within the Jewish people conquered by the Roman Empire, and became the dominant religion of the western world. Galileo was persecuted by the Spanish Inquisition for his heretical idea that the Earth revolved around the sun.
Both evolution and democracy began as controversial ideas.
Awareness of global warming and peak oil started among bold outliers several decades (some say even centuries) ago. Now the reality of global warming is forcing itself into mainstream awareness, clamoring for immediate attention.
Today, the ancestral arts/primitive skills movement spreads on the edge of our Industrial Growth Society. The home-schooling and unschooling movements grow outside the boundaries of traditional education. Alternative healing modalities flourish at the edges of our conventional medical system.
It takes a lot of courage to travel to that edge place and peer beyond. It takes a willingness to live with uncertainty, to offer ourselves without knowing what the final shape will be, to act with no guarantee of success.
“It is the awakened exiles who know that something essential has been lost and must be sought for again and can only be found where others fear to go,” writes mythologist and cultural anthropologist Michael Meade.
Here, on the edge of our crumbling civilization, we vision new possibilities, discover new ways of shaping ourselves, create new ways of combining together. Through intertwined roots we share what we find with those more embedded within the dominant culture.
In their own way, that’s what these rewilding grapevines are doing. In our own way, that’s what those of us who travel to the edge-places of our civilization must do – and are doing – our unique and shared visions stretching themselves into myriads of never-before-seen shapes and possibilities.
This year the grapes grew abundant and thick among these bravely rewilding vines. We harvested bagfuls, leaving plenty for birds and other neighbors. From these grapes we made a light, fizzy drink, more natural grape soda than sparkling wine.
We drank a toast to those rewilding grapes, and to all the tenacious beings, including ourselves and other humans, courageously finding ways to stretch themselves beyond the horizon of the world they have known and shape a habitat that those who come after will gratefully call home.
In what ways are you rewilding yourself at our cultures edge? In what ways have you visioned rewilding for yourself and others? Be in touch and let me know! (dianne@diannemonroe.com)
• Dianne Monroe embraces edges in Sonoma County, California. She is a Life Mentor and Inner Wilderness Guide. She offers programs and personal mentoring using a blend of creativity, Expressive Arts and deep nature connection to support people in discovering and deepening their understanding of soul purpose and life path. Visit her at www.diannemonroe.com, dianne@diannemonroe.com.
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