I still remember the event that made me into an environmentalist. I was seven or eight years old, standing outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big flock of birds,” I said.
My father told me then about the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once filled the skies, so vast that they stretched from horizon to horizon for hours on end. “They are extinct now,” he told me. “People would just point their guns to the sky and shoot randomly, and the pigeons would fall. Now there aren’t any left.” I’d known about the dinosaurs before then, but that was the first time I really understood the meaning of the word “extinct.”
I cried in my bed that night, and many nights thereafter. That was when I still knew how to cry—a capacity that, once extinguished through the brutality of teenage boyhood in the 1980s, was nearly as hard to resuscitate as it would be to bring the passenger pigeon back to earth.1
These two kinds of extinction are related. From what state of being do we extinguish other species, ruin earth and sea, and treat nature as a collection of resources to be allocated for maximum short-term benefit? It can come only from the constriction, numbing, and diversion of our capacity to feel empathy and love. No mere personal failing, this numbing is inseparable from the deep narratives that run our civilization, and the social systems that those narratives support.
Appearances to the contrary, it is neither folly nor myopia that sets us on a path of collective ruin. These are symptoms of a deeper malady. Would you say of the alcoholic that if he were only shown that drinking harms his health, relationships, and economic security, then his dismal future would scare him into quitting? Of course not. The foolish sacrifice of the future for a temporary surcease from the inner pain isn’t driven by stupidity. Therefore, you can harangue him about the damage to his liver all you want, and maybe he’ll say, “Yeah, you’re right,” and cut back for a few weeks, or he will promise to drink less, with every good intention. But nothing will really change. How similar that scenario is to the climate talks. We agree to cut back—and agree, at the same time, to ignore the social and economic conditions that make cutting back impossible. Carbon emissions continue to grow after nearly three decades of climate talks and agreements. This pattern extends beyond the matters of climate. Species continue to perish, bat colonies and bee hives to collapse, forests to wither, coral reefs to bleach, and elephants and whales to die. No one wants to live on a barren planet, a sick planet, or a dying planet, yet like an addict we seem helpless to change course.
Like many clichés, “our addiction to fossil fuels” contains a lost truth. Usually I hear the phrase used in tones of condemnation or disgust (betraying the same lack of empathy that is part of the problem). But if we take the addiction metaphor seriously, we would next inquire as to what drives the addiction.
Some on the left say it is capitalism. Yet the Soviet Union committed grievous environmental damage as well; besides, capitalism (like communism) is itself embedded in more fundamental belief systems that are largely beneath the surface of our awareness. It is these that I intend to excavate in this book, hoping therefrom to derive precepts and strategies for ecological healing. I will describe how many of the efforts to fight climate change or save the environment are based on the same assumptions that drive us toward ruin. I will identify fundamental problems in what I’ll call the Standard Narrative of climate change, and show how the framing of the problem is part of the problem. I will explain how solutions that come from that narrative risk making things worse. The maze thus revealed, I’ll explore the dark passageways and secret doorways that the dominant discourse ignores, but that an alternative Story of the World illuminates.
It is not wrong ideas that drive addiction. Addiction arises in the presence of basic unmet needs. The food addict isn’t really hungry for food; she is hungry for connection. The alcoholic is seeking just to feel okay for a while. The gambler yearns for liberation from economic or psychological confinement. The porn addict’s true desire is for intimacy and acceptance. These (admittedly, trivialized) examples at least convey a general principle: Desire comes from unmet needs. When the true object of the desire is unavailable, the desire is displaced onto the most accessible substitute. What is the unmet need behind the addiction to fossil fuels?
In addiction theory there is a concept of addiction transfer: when the addict is forcibly deprived of the object of her addiction, she will transfer the addiction onto something else. Recipients of bariatric surgery who can no longer overeat might start drinking or gambling instead. Overeating, drinking, and gambling are symptoms of a deeper wound. Similarly, I will argue, the current environmentalist obsession with fossil fuels is also too narrow. Conceivably, we could find another fuel source and maintain the addiction to a system of economics and production that consumes the world.
What is it that we are really looking for in our quest for bigger, faster, and more? Later chapters on energy and agriculture make it clear that humanity’s problems do not stem from any quantitative lack—hunger for instance is nearly always a result of maldistribution. We seek through growth to meet other needs, needs that, because they are fundamentally qualitative, growth can never meet. Basic human desires for connection, community, beauty, sacredness, and intimacy are met with faux substitutes that temporarily numb but ultimately heighten the longing. The trauma of our deprivation drives our collective addictions. Ecological healing therefore requires our society to look beneath its consumptive symptoms and reorient toward qualitative development. To do so requires significant reprogramming, since our guiding narratives, from economic to scientific, embody quantitative thinking.
Ecological deterioration is but one aspect of an initiation ordeal propelling civilization into a new story, a next mythology. By a mythology, I mean the narratives from which we weave our understanding of who we are, what is real, what is possible, why we are here, how change happens, what is important, how to live life, how the world came to be what it is, and what ought to come next. Ecological degradation is an inevitable consequence of the mythology—I call it the Story of Separation—that has dominated the last several centuries (and to an extent the last several millennia). To paraphrase Einstein, it will not be averted from within that mythology.
The essence of the Story of Separation is the separate self in a world of other. Since I am separate from you, your well-being need not affect mine. In fact, cast into an objective external universe, more for you is less for me; naturally then we are in competition with each other. If I can win the competition and dominate you, I’ll be better off and you worse. The same goes for humanity generally vis-à-vis nature. The more control we can exercise over the impersonal forces of nature, the better off we will be. The more intelligence we can impose upon a random, purposeless universe, the better the world will be. Our destiny, then, is to ascend beyond nature’s original limits, to become its lords and masters. The universe, this story says, is but atoms and void, possessing none of the qualities of a self that we experience as human beings: intelligence, purpose, sentience, agency, and consciousness. It is up to us then, to bring these qualities to the dead building blocks of the universe, its generic particles and impersonal forces; to imprint human intelligence onto the inanimate world.
The Story of Separation reverberates through every institution of the modern world. In other books I’ve described how it underlies money, law, medicine, science, technology, education, etc., and how these institutions might evolve under a different story.
This book also aims to describe and, I hope, accelerate the transition to a new (and in many ways ancient) story, with specific reference to climate change and the environmental crisis generally. A shift in mythology is more than a cognitive shift. In this book I will argue that the external changes we face are far more profound than merely switching industrial society to a zero-carbon fuel stock. Every aspect of society, the economy, and the political system must come into alignment with a new story.2
The name I like to use for the new story is Thich Nhat Hanh’s term “interbeing.” Although the word has Buddhist overtones, I do not profess to be a Buddhist, nor need the reader embrace Buddhism to appreciate the insights the concept allows.
Interbeing doesn’t go so far as to say, “We’re all one,” but it does release the rigid boundaries of the discrete, separate self to say that existence is relational. Who I am depends on who you are. The world is part of me, just as I am part of it. What happens to the world is in some way happening to me. The state of the cultural climate or political climate affects the condition of the geo-climate. When one thing changes, everything else must change too. The qualities of a self (sentience, agency, purpose, an experience of being) are not confined to humans alone. And the results of our actions will come back to affect ourselves, inescapably.
Interbeing must be more than a philosophical concept if anything is going to change. It must be a way of seeing, a way of being, a strategic principle, and most of all a felt reality. Philosophical arguments alone will not establish it any more than appeals to prudence and reason will solve the ecological crisis.
When we restore the internal ecosystem, the fullness of our capacity to feel and to love, only then will there be hope of restoring the outer. Each level of healing proceeds apace, just as each form of extinction mirrors the rest. That is not to suggest we withdraw from outer activism in favor of inner cultivation. It is that love and empathy are the felt dimensions of the Story of Interbeing, and we cannot act effectively from that story, nor truly serve it, without their guidance. They are the song that will lead us out of the maze. To follow their guidance we must regain our listening capacity, which trauma and ideology have numbed and restricted to a very narrow bandwidth.
Then we will know how to change the systems that reify Separation by severing our ties to community, plants, animals, land, and life and replacing those ties with the technology-mediated, money-mediated, generic relationships of mass society. (Thus bereft, no wonder we always hunger for “more.”)
Love is the expansion of self to include another. In love, your well-being is inseparable from my own. Your pain grieves me and your happiness gives me joy. The ideology of modernity circumscribes the scope of our love by assigning a narrow identity to the self and relegating the nonself to the status of mute, insensate objects or self-interested competitors. To care about others beyond their utility to oneself becomes therefore something of a delusion, like loving your pet brick.3 Perhaps that is why so much environmental rhetoric comes in the form of warnings that bad things will happen to us if we don’t change our ways. We call arguments “rational” when they appeal to self-interest. This book will argue that rational reasons are not enough; that the ecological crisis is asking for a revolution of love.
For the discrete and separate self in a world of other, love is irrational. Steeped in the logic of separation, the mind is ever in conflict with the heart. Not so, in the logic of interbeing, which recognizes that what happens to the other, to the incarcerated, to the bombed, to the trafficked, to the clear-cut, to the polluted, and to the extinguished is happening, in some sense, to the self as well. In the Story of Interbeing, heart and mind are reunited, and love is what the truth feels like.
If love is truth, then the source of our apparent myopia is clear. It is love benumbed. We do not see that what we devalue and destroy is part of ourselves. We do not see that we aren’t merely conditionally dependent on the oceans, rainforests, and every living system on Earth for survival; that something more important than survival is at stake. It is our humanity. It is our full beingness. Love benumbed, we believe that we can inflict damage without suffering damage ourselves.
Of course, I would not write a book that were just a vague promise that love will save the world. How do we enact it systemically? How do we overcome what blocks it? How do we awaken our benumbed empathy? How do we translate the diagnosis I’ve offered into practical action on the level of politics and ecological healing? These questions are the subject of this book.
Species extinction, as you know, did not end with the nineteenth century. The fate of the passenger pigeon foreshadowed the calamity that is now overtaking life on this planet, a calamity that has left none of us untouched. The calamity is the impoverishment of life, in every sense of that phrase. Extinction is one kind of impoverishment; the more general decline in biodiversity is another; so also with the spreading deserts on land and in the ocean and the general depletion of life even where it is green. Even when species don’t go extinct, often they decline to small remnant populations, shrink to a small portion of their original range, lose subspecies and genetic diversity, and inhabit vastly simplified ecosystems. This withering of biological life accompanies the impoverishment of human life and cultural vitality. All partake of the same crisis.
I recently made the acquaintance of a farmer in North Carolina whom I’ll call Mike, a man of the earth whose family has been here for three hundred years. His thick accent, increasingly rare in this age of mass-media-induced linguistic homogenization, suggested conservative “Southern values.” He was indeed full of bitterness, though not against the usual racial or liberal suspects; instead he launched into a tirade about the guvmint, chemtrails, the banks, the 9/11 conspiracy, the apathy of the “sheeple,” and so on. “We the people have got to rise up and smash them,” he said, but there was no fervor in his voice, only a leaden despair.
Tentatively, I broached the idea that the perpetrators of these crimes are themselves imprisoned in a world-story in which everything they do is necessary, right, and justified; and that we join them there when we adopt the paradigm of conquering evil through superior force. That is precisely what motivates the technologies of control, whether social, medical, material, or political, wielded by those we would overthrow. Besides, I said, if it comes down to a war to overthrow the tyrants, if it comes down to a contest of force, then we are doomed. They are the masters of war. They have the weapons: the guns, the bombs, the money, the surveillance state, the media, and the political machinery. If there is hope, there must be another way.
Perhaps this is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Dear reader, do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex at its own game?4 The modern environmental movement, and especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, not only risking defeat but sometimes worsening the situation even in its victories. The ecological crisis is calling us to a deeper kind of revolution. Its strategy involves restoring what the modern worldview and its institutions have rendered nearly extinct: our felt understanding of the living intelligence and interconnectedness of all things. To not feel that, is to be not fully alive. It is to live in poverty.
Mike wasn’t understanding me. He is an intelligent man, but it was as if something had possessed him; no matter what I said, he would pick up on one or two cue words to pour forth more bitterness. Obviously, I wasn’t going to “defeat the enemy” by force of intellect (thus enacting the very same paradigm I was critiquing). When I saw what was happening, I stopped talking and listened. I listened not so much on a semantic level, but to the voice beneath the words and to all that voice carried. Finally I knew what to do. I asked him the same question I want to ask you: “What made you into an environmentalist?”
That is when the anger and bitterness gave way to grief. Mike told me about the ponds and streams and wild lands that he hunted and fished and swam and roamed in his childhood, and how every single one of them had been destroyed by development: cordoned off, no-trespassed, filled in, cut down, paved over, and built up.
In other words, he became an environmentalist in the same way that I did, and, I am willing to guess, the same way you did. He became an environmentalist through experiences of beauty and loss.
“Would the guys ordering the chemtrails do it, if they could feel what you are feeling now?” I asked.
“No. They wouldn’t be able to do it.”
The truth of that moment Mike and I shared stands alongside the reality that, actually, they would be able to do it, that “they” in fact includes each one of us who participates in this civilization. A single moment of reverence, gratitude, or grief, however profound, is not enough to undo generations of programming, nor to extricate ourselves from an economy and society of ecocide. Are you able to get into your car, knowing the effect of emissions and oil spills and the geopolitics of oil extraction? I certainly am, and you probably are too. You might have a story about why it is okay, why in your case it is justified, or at least why you are okay for doing it. “I have no choice,” you might think. Or “At least I feel bad about it. At least I’m opposed to it. At least I vote for people or donate money to organizations who are trying to change the system. Besides, I’m driving a hybrid.” All kinds of reasons why it is okay to get into your car right now. Or maybe you don’t think about it at all.
My point here is not that you are deluding yourself—you pathetic, self-justifying hypocrite! It is to illuminate the fallacy of our judgments and the war thinking that they engender. And it is to suggest that we are not normally feeling what Mike was describing, because we live in a system, an ideology, and probably a wounded psychology that allow full feeling only sporadically. The system numbs us; it also depends on our numbness.
I want us to transcend the language of “Is it okay?” entirely, and underneath it, “Am I okay?” This is the language of war turned inward. Along with defeating the enemy, we seek to conquer its internal projection: the greedy, hypocritical, dishonest, egotistical, self-serving parts of ourselves. In this campaign, self-disgust is considered an ally, the first sign of redemption, because now we are joining the good side, with parts of ourselves as the enemy. Dissociating from those parts, we imagine that we are making progress in overcoming them. Such great efforts we are making, such commendable progress.
Are we ever making progress though? Or is any progress merely in our ability to excuse, cloak, and rationalize the choices that don’t fit the image of our ethics?
Corporations and governments do just that: they cloak, they excuse, they deny, and they make cosmetic, self-justifying changes to uphold a green image. We would like to blame greenwashing on corporate duplicity and greed—giving us an external enemy to fight—but (like our own self-justifications) I am afraid it is rooted in something much deeper.
In both cases, personal and political, to blame moral failings for the horrifying predicament of people and planet is a dangerous error that diverts attention away from systemic and ideological causes. It disguises a problem that we don’t know how to solve as a problem that we do. We know, in theory at least, how to stop bad people from doing bad things. We can deter them, surveil them, imprison them, or kill them. We can fight them, and if we win the fight, the problem is solved.
Our political discourse is rife with good-versus-evil narratives. It is obvious to each side that they are good and the other side is evil (or some cipher therefor: sick, irrational, twisted, unethical, corrupt, “acting from the reptilian brain,” etc.). Both sides agree on that. Therefore, both sides also agree on the strategic template for victory: arouse as much outrage and indignation as possible among the Good Folk so that they will rise up and cast down the Evil Folk. No wonder our civic discourse has degenerated into such polarized extremes.
That does not mean that I hold no opinion about which side is right in the political questions of our day. Nor am I saying that truth is a matter of opinion or that we create our reality. It is rather that those in our society typically misunderstand the causes of others’ opinions and behavior.
To blame evil is to misdiagnose the problem. I explored this idea in depth in my last book; here I’ll just ask you to insert yourself into the totality of the circumstances of a fracking executive. The “totality of circumstances” could include:
What actions would you take from those conditions? What would be your hardest choices? Your most painful compromises?
What are your hardest choices and most painful compromises right now? Do you drive a car that burns gasoline? Did you drive somewhere when it was raining yesterday, when you really could have biked? Do you take energy-consuming hot showers? Do you tread on cement sidewalks? Do you use a cellphone containing conflict minerals? Do you use credit cards or banks who fund the pillage of nature? If so, someone out there probably thinks you are evil too. Exploiter! Hypocrite! Consumer of more than your share! You might sometimes think that about yourself too. Other times, you will have compassion for yourself, realizing that given your circumstances, your burdens, your traumas, and your limitations, you are doing the best you can.
Does this mean we might as well give up on change? No. It means we need to ask, What are the circumstances that give birth to the choices that are harming the world? Engaging other people, we have to ask the question that defines compassion: What is it like to be you? The more we understand, the more we live in reality and the less we inhabit a fantasy world populated by our projections. You can go ahead and see your opponents as dastardly villains, but if that is not the truth of who they are, then you are living in a delusion. Focusing on the bad guys, we become blind to deeper, systemic causes, forever chasing false solutions that actually maintain the status quo.
Living in a delusion, we endlessly re-create its landscape; we repeatedly enact its roles and manufacture its dramas, racing along the same old paths of the maze. Even if we achieve temporary victory against the bad guys, the overall situation doesn’t seem to change. We never get closer to the exit. What we normally achieve is, instead of victory, a strengthened conviction that we are in fact the good guys. That polarized view is one of the things we will have to give up if we are to launch the era of ecological healing. Are you prepared to sacrifice being the winner? Are you willing to sacrifice being one day proved right? Are you willing to stop seeing yourself on Team Good fighting Team Evil? Because that’s one thing that both sides of any debate normally believe of themselves, and that is the template of “othering” that exemplifies and reinforces human separation from nature.
I ask these questions deliberately. I will argue in this book that all the positions on the spectrum of climate change opinion, from skepticism to catastrophism, are wrong. Like those who blame evil people for the world’s evil, they operate in too shallow a causal framework. The totality of circumstances driving ecological degradation and climate derangement is greater than conventional opinion recognizes.
None of the above is to deny that horrible things are happening to life on this planet. Someone is bulldozing the trees, draining the wetlands, bottom-trawling the fish, and polluting water, air, and soil. Each time, that someone is a human being.
Since most of the damage happens at the behest of large corporations, it seems reasonable to name them as the enemy. Expose their immoral behavior! Hold them to account! Deter their crimes with meaningful penalties! Get their money out of politics! Then we can at least reduce their worst excesses.
This argument is reasonable under current conditions, but it accepts as unchangeable the very things we must change. I’ll offer some specifics later in the book; for now, a generality: fighting the enemy is futile when you inhabit a system that has the endless generation of enemies built into it. That is a recipe for endless war.
If that is to change, then one of the addictions—more fundamental than the addiction to fossil fuels—that we are going to have to give up is the addiction to fighting. Then we can examine the ground conditions that produce an endless supply of enemies to fight.
The addiction to fighting draws from a perception of the world as composed of enemies: indifferent forces of nature tending toward entropy, and hostile competitors seeking to further their reproductive or economic self-interest over our own. In a world of competitors, well-being comes through domination. In a world of random natural forces, well-being comes through control. War is the mentality of control in its most extreme form. Kill the enemy—the weeds, the pests, the terrorists, the germs—and the problem is solved once and for all.
Except that it never is. World War I—the “war to end all wars”—was followed by another, even more horrific, soon after. Nor did evil disappear after the defeat of the Nazis or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Union was, however, a crisis for a society that had come to define itself through its enemies; thus followed a desperate search for a new enemy in the early 1990s that resulted in the feeble candidate of “Colombian drug lords” for a time before settling on “terror.”
The War on Terror gave a new lease on life to a culture built on war-making; indeed it seemed to offer the prospect of permanent war. Unfortunately for the military-industrial complex, the public seems to be growing less terrified of terror, necessitating a series of new threats by which to maintain a climate of fear. It is hard to say that the scare campaigns of the last few years—Russian hackers, Islamic terror, Ebola, the Zika virus, Assad’s chemical weapons, and Iran’s nuclear program, to name a few—have not worked. The media at least clangs the alarm, and the public seems to have gone along with the policies that these campaigns justify, such as massive spraying programs in Florida to “combat Zika.” However (and this may in part be a function of my countercultural social circles), I have not seen much actual fear about these things, nothing like the palpable dread of the Soviet Union that was nearly universal in my childhood. The public discounts pretty much anything the authorities say, including the fear-mongering. Its apathy permits the governing elites to pursue their programs of control, but no longer do they channel and harness real fear. Is anyone outside the political classes actually afraid of Iran, Bashar al-Assad, or Vladimir Putin? One suspects that neither are the politicians, though they may display a semblance of alarm as a political posture.
I bring up the waning power of scare tactics because the effort to halt ecological collapse uses many of these very same scare tactics. The primary climate change narrative is basically, “Trust us, bad things will happen if we don’t hurry up and make big changes. It’s almost too late—the enemy is at the gates!” I want to question the assumption that we can and should motivate the public with fear-based appeals to self-interest. What about the opposite? What about appeals to love? Is life on earth valuable or sacred in its own right, or only in its utility to ourselves?
Climate change activism abounds in war narratives, war metaphors, and war strategies. The reason, aside from the deep-seated habits of the Story of Separation, is the desire to inspire the fervor and commitment that people display in wartime. Following the rhetorical template of war, we invoke an existential threat.
I don’t think it is working. I hesitate to use the term “climate change” in my essay titles. The last time I did so, one reader wrote to me saying, “I almost didn’t read your post because it had the words climate change in the title, and I’m just so sick of hearing the same thing over and over again.”
Maybe we are becoming war-weary. Does it take more and more exhortation to goad you into joining another battle? Have you encountered burnout, when no new horror can stimulate you to the kind of engagement you practiced a few years ago? Burnout seems the downfall of activists, but as the story of the man lost in a maze implies, it can be a necessary initiation into a wholly different mode of engagement.
My friend Pat McCabe, a Diné (Navajo) woman and longtime student of the Lakota Way, puts it this way: “When you reach the end of your resource, then the magic happens.” When we exhaust what we know, then what we don’t know becomes possible.
Struck with grief at the ruin of life on earth, one might understandably take offense at any suggestion that we “give up the fight.” To someone steeped in war mentality, to give up the fight means to withdraw from action. I’m suggesting we give up the fight in another sense: as the orienting principle of our efforts to heal the earth. There may still be battles, but we will access much greater power to heal when we frame the issue in terms of peace.
It is often observed that the last major war to unambiguously achieve its objectives was World War II. Since then, military conflicts have usually ended in stalemate, quagmire, or defeat for the stronger power. The failure of, for example, the U.S. war in Afghanistan is not due to inferior weaponry. It is that its weaponry is insufficient to its objective, which cannot be achieved by force. Guns and bombs cannot usually bring stability, “win hearts and minds,” or make a country pro-American, unless it is an unambiguous case of saving people from evil despots or aggressors.5 To justify war, we have to fit every situation into that storyline, as the media has tried to do in every conflict since Vietnam.
The same goes for nonmilitary wars. In my lifetime I’ve heard declarations of a War on Poverty, a War on Cancer, a War on Drugs, a War on Terror, a War on Hunger, and now a War on Climate Change. None of these have been any more efficacious than the War in Iraq.
If the “fight” against climate change is a war, it is clear which side is winning. Greenhouse gas emissions have relentlessly increased since they were first widely acknowledged as a problem in the late 1980s. Deforestation has also continued and in some places even accelerated since then. Nor has any progress been made in altering the basic fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure of society. If war were the only answer, then we would have to respond by fighting even harder. If there is another way, then the habit of fighting becomes an obstacle to victory.
In the case of ecocide, the mentality of war is not only an obstacle to healing, it is an intimate part of the problem. War is based on a kind of reductionism: it reduces complex interconnected causes—that include oneself—to a simple, external cause called the enemy. Furthermore, it normally depends on the reduction of the enemy to a degraded caricature of a human being. The demonization and dehumanization of the enemy is little different from the desacralization of nature upon which ecocide depends. To render nature into an other undeserving of reverence and respect, an object to dominate, control, and subjugate, is of a kind with the dehumanization and exploitation of human beings.
Respect for nature is inseparable from respect for all beings, including the human. It is impossible to cultivate one without the other. Climate change, therefore, calls us to a greater transformation than a mere change in our energy sources. It calls us to transform the fundamental relationship between self and other, including but not limited to the relation between the collective self of humanity and its “other,” nature.
The philosophically inclined reader may protest that self and other are not really separate, or that the human/nature distinction is an artificial, false, and destructive binary, an invention of the modern mind. Indeed, “nature” as a separate category suggests that we humans are unnatural and, therefore, potentially exempt from nature’s laws. Whatever the underlying metaphysics, what is changing is our mythology. We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.
Part of the mythology of separation is a belief in nature-as-thing; in other words, the belief that only human beings are possessed of full selfhood. This is what licenses us to exploit the beings of nature for our own ends, much as dehumanization of brown people licensed lighter-skinned people to enslave them.
The dominant culture’s recognition of who counts as a fully subjective, conscious, and worthy self has been expanding now for several hundred years. Two or three centuries ago, only a propertied white male was a full subject. Then that category was expanded to include all white males. Eventually it expanded again to include women as well, and people whose skin is not white. Then along came the animal rights movement, which said that animals too have consciousness, subjectivity, and an inner life, and should not therefore be treated as mere brutes or meat-machines. More recently, remarkable scientific discoveries have emerged around plant intelligence, mycelial intelligence, soil intelligence, forest intelligence, and even the capacity of water to hold and transmit complex, dynamic patterns of information. These discoveries seem to be converging on the universal indigenous belief that everything is alive and aware.
Just as bigotry and ecocide both depend on the dehumanization or “de-selfing” of the other, so also is the reversal of both part of the same movement toward a Story of Interbeing. Again, that term goes beyond mere interconnectedness or interdependency, to say that we are existentially connected to all other beings and to the world at large. My very being partakes in your being, and in the being of the whales, the elephants, the forests, and the oceans. What happens to them happens as well to me, on some level. When a species goes extinct something dies in us too; we cannot escape the impoverishment of the world we live in.
This applies equally to ecological, economic, and political well-being. The days of colonialism and imperialism—in which the wealth of one nation was built on the plunder of others—are dwindling. The era of thinking that human wealth could be built on the plunder of nature is nearly over too. Certainly, the outward structures of both kinds of plunder seem as robust as ever, even expanding to new extremes. However, their ideological core has hollowed out. Our converging crises are initiating humanity into the new and ancient mythology of interbeing.
Later I will argue that the reality of the climate crisis is different from our common perception of it. Yet perceptions are important. The core truth of climate change is that we are at the end of an era. We are at the end of the Age of Separation. It is a transition that has been under way for three generations now, inaugurated by the most extreme of all possible technologies of control applied at the very pinnacle of Total War. I am speaking, of course, of the Bomb.
The Age of War properly came to an end in 1945, when for the first time in history human beings developed a weapon too terrible to use. It took two horrific applications of the atomic bomb to set the stage for decades of “mutually assured destruction,” a glimmering of the evolutive realization that what we do to the Other, we do to ourselves. For the first time in history, total war between the great powers was impossible. Today, aside from an unregenerate minority, no one contemplates using nuclear weapons even in cases where retaliation is unlikely. Radioactive blowback makes large-scale use unthinkable, but there is another thing that holds us back too. We name it, perhaps, conscience or ethics, but history makes it tragically clear that conscience or ethics alone are not enough to stop the foolish and the horrific. No, something else has changed.
What has changed, I believe, is that the consciousness of interbeing is dawning in the dominant civilization. What we do to the Other, we do to ourselves. This will be the defining understanding of the next civilization—if there is a next civilization. Right now we (usually in this book, when I say “we” I mean the dominant culture on this planet) are facing lesson number two in the curriculum of interbeing. Lesson one was the Bomb. Lesson two is climate change.