“Someday, Charles, you are going to have to decide if you want to be relevant.”
So said to me a prominent environmentalist after hearing me describe the diverse fields of my activity and interest. What he meant was something like this:
There is a shrinking window for climate action before irreversible feedback loops render human extinction inevitable. Therefore, the only relevant action you can take right now is to put 100 percent of your efforts into cutting greenhouse gas emissions as swiftly as possible by whatever means necessary. Your other interests are irrelevant. If we don’t implement a meaningful carbon tax soon, then the healing of the relation between the masculine and feminine won’t matter. Nor will saving the whales. Nor will ending the school-to-prison pipeline. Social justice, education, psych meds, holistic medicine, scientific anomalies, attachment parenting, community building, new economics, philosophy, history, cosmology, neo-Lamarckian biology, sacred plant medicines, nonviolent communication, plant intelligence, threatened languages, indigenous sovereignty, pansubjective metaphysics—none of the issues you write about matter unless they have a direct, significant, near-term impact on greenhouse gases. Once we’ve won that fight, we can turn our attention to those other things. So are you going to join the fight?
This pattern of thinking is called fundamentalism, and it closely parallels the dynamics of two defining institutions of our civilization: money and war. Fundamentalism reduces the complex to the simple and demands the sacrifice of the immediate, the human, or the personal in service to an overarching ulterior goal that trumps all. Disciplined by the promise of heavenly rewards or hellish punishments, the extreme religious fundamentalist shuts down his humanity in service to what his religion says God wants. Disciplined by economic exigency, millions of people sacrifice time, energy, family, and what they really care about in pursuit of money. Disciplined by an existential threat, a nation at war turns away from culture, leisure, civil liberties, and everything that is of no utility to the war effort.
Anyone who is wary of these institutions might also be wary of the standard climate change narrative, which lends itself to the same focus on a universal cause and the same mentality of sacrifice to an all-important end. If we agree that the survival of humanity is at stake, then any means is justified, and any other cause—say reforming the prisons, housing the homeless, caring for the autistic, rescuing abused animals, or visiting your grandmother—becomes an unjustifiable distraction from the only important thing. Taken to its extreme, it requires that we harden our hearts to the needs in front of our faces. There is no time to waste! Everything is at stake! It’s do or die! How similar to the logic of war. No wonder, as a community organizer just told me, there is such hostility toward environmentalists among inner-city and other impoverished populations. They are the ones whose needs are ignored and indeed who are sacrificed first in the war effort.
While this book is focused on the realm of ecological healing, it disengages from the rhetoric of “Nothing else is important compared to this.” That’s the rhetoric that has alienated so many working-class people and minorities from environmentalism, because it carries a patronizing message of “We know better than you do what you should be caring about.” It invalidates their grievances. Because, really, what does racially biased stop-and-frisk policing and the criminalization of large segments of the population matter in the face of civilizational collapse? What does sweatshop labor or carcinogens in the water supply matter, when climate change might render Earth inhospitable to human life? Your concerns are not important. If we carry this belief, even without being so impolitic as to voice it, we are going to radiate a crusading energy that is attractive only to our fellow fundamentalists.
If we want to foster a broad social consensus to protect and heal the planet, then we need to undo this logic at the source. The mind that is steeped in Separation protests, “But it is true! None of these things are relevant if the atmosphere warms by ten degrees.”1 This belief depends on a world-story that does not recognize the intimate interconnectedness of all things. If we see reality as a collection of separate, causally dissociated phenomena, then of course it will seem that stopping gentrification in Brooklyn or sex trafficking in Haiti is frivolous in the face of climate change.
From the Story of Interbeing, we intuit different kinds of cause and effect. We are not surprised that in a carceral society that locks up millions of its members, those outside the prisons lose their freedom too. We are not surprised that when a nation perpetrates violence around the world, that no amount of security, surveillance, walls, or fences can keep violence from sneaking back in, as domestic violence or self-destructive habits. And we are not surprised that environmental pollution and habitat degradation are mirrored in bodily illness and the degradation of our inner landscapes. The illusion of separation has us think that one could conceivably thrive on a poisonous planet with the right air filters, water filters, EMF blockers, supplements, air conditioners, antibiotics, antifungals, bug zappers, and so on, replacing a world of nature with a world of technology. In interbeing, we know that health for one is impossible to sustain without health for all.
If we want solidarity, we need to understand that genocide and ecocide, human degradation and ecological degradation, are part of the same fabric, and that neither will change without the other changing. It is not that we should pay attention to racial or class injustice with the strategic goal of bringing those people into environmental activism. It is to recognize that healing on any level contributes to healing on every level. Because we are unaccustomed to thinking holistically, it seems counterintuitive that starting a social enterprise that employs homeless people will help stop climate change; the causal links are not evident to our way of seeing. Our dominant system of knowledge production (science) operates by controlling variables, breaking wholes into parts, and establishing measurable, predictable causal mechanisms. Then the knowledge is culturally legitimate. But the causal threads that link homelessness to ecological ruin are neither measurable nor predictable. Indeed, a cynic, channeling Ebenezer Scrooge, might argue that rehabilitating homeless people worsens climate change by transforming them into consuming members of society.
Of course, it is possible to construct an argument that housing the homeless contributes to the health of the biosphere, but it will not easily fit into the language of climate policy, nor is it likely to convince Mr. Scrooge. However, when Scrooge undergoes a shift in consciousness and sees the world through the eyes of interbeing, he will expect that the two phenomena are related. Believing in an innate intelligence pervading all phenomena, he might surmise that a society inhospitable to its vulnerable members will be mirrored by a planet that is inhospitable to society. He will expect that the deep roots of homelessness are common with the deep roots of climate change. Instead of “fighting homelessness” he will seek to understand the bed from which it arises. He will understand that it is okay to devote himself to what stirs his compassion the most, confident that what he is doing is still “relevant” in the face of global crisis. And he will no longer operate from self-preservation and survival anxiety, because he will understand that his well-being is inseparable from that of all in his expanding circle of love.
The question to explore then is what induces a shift to the consciousness of interbeing? Scrooge’s creator Charles Dickens knew. It is through a confrontation with beauty, suffering, and mortality. It is through a connection to what is real. One might call it an initiatory experience. Without it, the grip of self-preservation and survival anxiety never loosens. We might try to leverage those fears (through the threat of climate change) to motivate pro-environmental behavior, but invoking self-interest to solve a problem caused by runaway, blind self-interest merely adds fuel to the fire. We need the opposite: to expand the circle of compassion to include every being on this earth.
Climate fundamentalism, translated into policy, bears consequences that are in direct opposition to what those policies seek to achieve. The main problem lies precisely in the aforementioned reductionism—to simplify a complicated matrix of causes into a single, identifiable cause. In today’s environmental discourse, that cause is greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide.
Like war thinking and money thinking, the problem with carbon reductionism is that it reduces “everything matters” to “one thing matters.” In the words of Moreno and colleagues, “Once species and ecosystems have been entered into accounts, there is no need to look further into complexities, uncertainties and interlinkages … trying to make reality and its contradictions fungible into carbon units entails cultural, symbolic and epistemic violence.”2
Carbon reductionism sits comfortably within a broader, scientific reductionism. The indictment of science as reductionistic is often misunderstood to refer to its quest to explain the behavior of wholes by the properties of their parts. This quest, though, rests on a more insidious and more fundamental reductionism: that of the world into number. Its conceit is that someday, when everything has been ordered, classified, and measured, we will have penetrated every mystery and the world will finally be ours. This reduction of reality to quantity is a reduction of the infinite to the finite, the sacred to the mundane, and the qualitative to the quantitative. It is the abnegation of mystery, aspiring to encompass all of reality in its bounds.
The totalizing quest to capture the world in number never succeeds. Something always escapes the metrics and the models: the unmeasurable, the qualitative, and what seems irrelevant. Usually, the judgment as to what is relevant encodes the intellectual biases of those doing the measuring, and often the economic and political biases too. You might say that what is left out is our shadow. Like many things we ignore or suppress, it roars back in the form of perverse, unforeseeable consequences. Thus, although it is the epitome of rationality to make decisions by the numbers, the results often appear to be insane.
To see the problem, consider the Tehri Dam project on India’s Bhagirathi River, completed in 2006. Constructed after decades of opposition by environmentalists and local residents, the dam submerged pristine ecosystems and ancient farms, displacing a hundred thousand villagers. Like countless other dams still being built in India, China, and Africa, it was touted for its contribution to greenhouse gas reduction and has been one of many dams to generate carbon trading credits. On a superficial level, it attained its measurable objective. But what about the displaced villagers? It could be that in the particulars that are measured, their lives improved: perhaps each was rehabilitated in concrete apartments superior to their ancestral homes in terms of square meters, plumbing, and electrification. However, in terms of the lost traditions, severed social ties, lost memories, lost knowledge, and the uniqueness of each submerged place—in short, in terms of all that could not be measured, and all that was considered not worth measuring—human beings and nature suffered a grievous loss.
Adding injury to injury, in the long run it is doubtful whether the dam even reduced CO2 levels. Before they were displaced, the villagers had nearly a zero carbon footprint, or perhaps a negative footprint given that traditional agricultural practices can sequester carbon in the ground. Following their displacement, the newly urbanized villagers had to adopt more carbon-intensive consumer lifestyles, eating food shipped in from distant places, getting jobs in the industrial economy. Further, each new hydroelectric dam contributes to a trend of industrialization, adding to an infrastructure that is always hungry for more. It didn’t come in place of coal-fired plants; it came in addition to them.
Hydroelectric dams generate electricity without burning fossil fuels, it is true, and it is easy to compute the tons of CO2 that would be emitted by equivalent coal- or gas-fired plants. It is much harder to compute the carbon storage capacity of the ecosystems submerged in the dam reservoir, or the methane released by inundated vegetation (although recent estimates put methane emissions from artificial reservoirs at 104 megatons annually—as much as all fossil fuel methane emissions combined).3 Harder still to calculate would be the effects of trophic cascades initiated by the deprivation of organic sediments to fish and riparian ecosystems downstream. The sediment is essential to build deltas and prevent ocean encroachment.4 Given wetlands’ huge carbon sequestration potential, it is possible that (even within the carbon reductionism frame, not to mention the water frame I’ll present later) dam removal contributes more to climate stability than dam building does. Our “science-based” opinion depends on what we include in our measurements.
One unfortunate result of the fossil fuel divestment movement has been a giant land grab in Africa and South America, as investment capital turns toward biofuels plantations. Biofuels represent the most extreme possible form of reductionism: the reduction of living beings to heat. Along the way, existing peasant agriculture and ecosystems are also reduced—to jatropha or palm oil plantations, sugar cane plantations, woodchipping operations, and so on—even as diverse farm livelihoods are reduced to wage labor. By way of illustration, in the last decade controversy has erupted over the acquisition of vast tracts of land in Ghana by European corporations for the purpose of planting jatropha, whose oil-rich seeds, while toxic to humans and animals, are an excellent biofuel feedstock. Jatropha requires large plantations (1,000+ hectares) to be economically viable, which must be cleared of existing vegetation. Usually, they must be cleared as well of existing smallholder farmers. Since most land in Ghana is communally owned, this requires making deals with traditional chiefs, often illiterate, who may not understand the legal ramifications of the documents they are thumbprinting, especially when they are accustomed to regarding land as a sacred being rather than a fungible commodity.
The result is massive disruption of traditional lifestyles, human rights abuses, hunger, and ecological degradation. In a story replayed around the world, one reads of farmers showing up one day at their fields only to be told they are trespassing, and must abandon years or decades of investment in the land. The biofuel companies say that only previously uncultivated land is used and (somewhat contradictorily) that farmers who are evicted are compensated, but these claims don’t always coincide with facts on the ground. Traditional chiefs or other persons of influence may get hired by the biofuel companies, setting their interests against those of the community. The plantation jobs dangled in front of the community don’t always materialize, nor are they sufficient to compensate for the lost food crops. In South America, peasants and environmentalists who resist land grabs and hydroelectric projects are sometimes targets of paramilitary death squads. None of these effects are visible in the spreadsheets that inform climate policymakers. What we don’t count, we don’t know.
But at least the biofuels result in less atmospheric CO2, right? Well, not necessarily. It depends on how you do the math. Do you include the lost carbon sequestration potential of the ruined ecosystem? The carbon released by increased levels of soil erosion? The unpredictable effects of disruptions in the hydrological cycle? The effects of local farmers leaving the land for the cities, where they become consumers in the global food system? Ignore these and you will be able to maintain the belief that biofuels are a fine thing for the planet. No doubt, that is what the biofuels companies believe. These people are not evil; they, like most of us, live in a story that valorizes their choices. That is why we need to propagate a new story that values people and place, soil and water, biodiversity and life; the qualitative and the relational.
Climate arguments have also been invoked in favor of giant woodchipping operations that are destroying forests in the southeastern United States and Eastern Europe. Close examination reveals these arguments as bogus, but when the policy establishment is in the habit of trusting the numbers, it is vulnerable to biased numbers, especially when financial interests of politically powerful lobbies are involved. And so, enormous woodchipping machines lower their hoods over one treetop after another, roaring down upon each and, in a matter of seconds, converting a living being into “climate-friendly biofuel.”5
The problem here is not with biofuels per se. The problem, as with many other technologies, comes mostly with industrial scale and blindness to local ecological effects of production. Similarly, we adopt photovoltaic and wind energy in the name of environmental health, counting the tons of carbon they replace while ignoring the toxic waste produced in PV panel and lithium-ion battery manufacture, and the birds and bats wind turbines kill. Those who bring up such issues are marginalized as nitpicking naysayers. All the more invisible are issues like adverse health effects from wind turbine noise (and who knows the effects of noise on wildlife?) or the climate consequences of what one indigenous person called “stealing the wind.” What we don’t know, we don’t count.
To those wedded to the quantitative approach to problem-solving, any failure of quantification is to be remedied with even more quantification. Metrics-based thinking says that to remedy abuses of metrics, we need to extend them further, so that our measurements accurately encompass the uncounted emissions and lost sequestration. If only we could extend our measurements to totality, we would be able to make optimum decisions. But will our measurements ever be complete? No. Something will always be left out—the image of what we devalue.
What is typically measured is that which serves the economic and political interests, and unconscious biases, of those who commission the measurements. Then there are those things that we don’t bother to measure because they are fundamentally unmeasurable, such as the sacredness of land, or of the water feeding the Ganges. Other cultures might say this river, that mountain, this forest is sacred. Is this just superstitious thinking that gets in the way of rational decision-making? Considering that our culture is ruining the planet whereas others, that had a sense of the sacred, lived sustainably on it for thousands of years, perhaps we should be cautious about imposing the value system encoded in our measuring onto the world.
By focusing on a measurable quantity, we devalue that which we cannot measure or choose not to measure. Such issues such as biodiversity, toxic pollution, radioactive waste, etc., not to mention social injustice and economic inequality, recede in urgency under the regime of carbon accountancy. Certainly one can make carbon-based arguments on all these issues, but to do so is to step onto dangerous ground. By saying “Stop the cement plant because of CO2,” you are also implying “If CO2 weren’t a problem, it would be fine.” Right off the bat, you eliminate as allies anyone who doesn’t believe in climate change. If global warming falls out of scientific favor, then all the environmental arguments pinned to it would collapse as well.
Imagine that you are trying to stop a strip mine by citing the fuel use of the equipment and the lost carbon sink of the forest that needs to be cleared, and the mining company says, “Okay, we’re going to do this in the most green way possible; we are going to fuel our bulldozers with biofuels, run our computers on solar power, and plant two trees for every tree we chop down.” You get into a tangle of arithmetic, none of which touches the real reason you wanted to stop the mine—because you love that mountaintop, that forest, those waters that would be poisoned.
The failures of carbon-motivated policies have something in common—they emphasize the global over the local, the distant over the immediate, and the measurable over the qualitative. This oversight is part of a more general mentality that sacrifices what is precious, sacred, and immediate for a distant end. It is the mentality of instrumentalism that values other beings and the earth itself in terms of their utility for us; it is the hubris of believing we can predict and control the consequences of our actions; it is the trust in mathematical modeling that allows us to make decisions according to the numbers; it is the belief that we can identify a “cause”—a cause that is something and not everything—and that we can best understand reality by dissecting it and isolating variables.
Usually, making decisions “by the numbers” means making them according to financial considerations. Is it really a very deep change to take the same methods and mentality and apply them instead to some other number?
We are in familiar territory in addressing problems by attacking their isolable, direct causes. That again is the mentality of war—end crime by deterring the perpetrators, end evil by dominating the evildoers, end drug abuse by banning drugs, stop terrorism by killing the terrorists. But the world is more complicated than that. As the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Weeds, the War on Terrorism, and the War on Germs show us, causation is usually not linear. Crime, drugs, weeds, terrorism, and germs might be symptoms of a deeper, systemic disharmony. Poor soil invites weeds. A run-down body offers a salubrious environment for germs. Poverty breeds crime. Imperialism begets violent resistance. Alienation, hopelessness, loss of meaning, and disintegration of community foster drug addiction. To address the complex of deep causes is a lot more difficult than to find something to blame and attack it using the familiar reductionistic methods.
Climate change is the same. It is a symptomatic fever of a deeper disharmony, a disharmony that pervades all aspects of our civilization. The fundamentalist wants to reduce every thing to one thing. That is convenient, if you would rather not look at everything.
As with terrorism, drugs, or germs, if we crack down on the proximate cause without addressing the underlying condition, the symptoms will return in a new and more virulent form. Similarly, when we make decisions by the numbers, then that which is not measured, the excluded other, will come back to haunt us.
Earth is a complex living system whose homeostatic maintenance depends on the robust interaction of every living and nonliving subsystem. As I will argue later, the biggest threat to life on earth is not fossil fuel emissions, but the loss of forests, soil, wetlands, and marine ecosystems. Life maintains life. When these relationships break down, the results are unpredictable: global warming, perhaps, or global cooling, or the increasingly unstable gyrations of a system spinning out of control. This is the threat we face, and because it is multifactorial and nonlinear, it cannot be overcome by simply reducing CO2 emissions.
While most environmentalists also care deeply about social justice, environmental narratives and particularly the climate narrative often suggest that social issues are of secondary importance compared to the grand mission to save the planet. Earlier I observed that this call for sacrifice to fight an overarching threat is identical to the way war is used to override social justice movements. “Stop whining—don’t you know there’s a war on?” My associate Marie Goodwin once asked a prominent climate crusader, “But don’t you think community-building is also important today?” He replied, “Not really. If we don’t put everything we’ve got into stopping climate change right now, we won’t have any community to build.” This pattern of thinking that climate change shares with war, I said, should make us alert. Now I am making a further point. It is not that “social justice is important too” (leaving unsaid, “but not as important as saving the planet”). It is that social healing is indispensable in ecological healing.
First and most obviously, it is indispensable because it is hard to effectively enact love for others when one is hurting desperately oneself. A hurting person usually passes on that hurt to those they love, helplessly. Contrary to what the more fortunate among us might think, when the alcoholic man abuses his children it is not because he loves them less than we love our own children. As with a hurting person, so with a hurting society. We cannot expect a miserable, oppressed populace to exercise much care for anything outside its immediate survival and security. While the poor are kept in a state of survival anxiety through sheer deprivation, the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.
Most human suffering on this planet comes not from unavoidable tragedies like accidents and natural disasters, but from human beings themselves. Human trafficking and sweatshop labor, political violence and domestic abuse, racial oppression and gender violence, poverty and war … all co-arise with our systems, our perceptions, and our narratives. These narratives are born of trauma and give birth to trauma.
Herein lies a link between economic justice, social justice, and the environment. We will continue to abuse our fellow beings, even our own Mother Earth, as long as we carry unhealed social traumas. This does not mean “heal our traumas first before we try to heal the environment.” It is to recognize that social healing and ecological healing are the same work. Neither is to be privileged over the other; neither can succeed without the other.
From the causal logic of interbeing—morphic resonance—it is easy to understand how a society that exploits and abuses its most vulnerable will also exploit and abuse nature. To take care of vulnerable people generates a field of care that facilitates care for other vulnerable beings. A caring society is one that is habituated to asking, “Who is being left out? Who is suffering? Who is unrecognized in their gifts? Whose needs are not being met?” These are the questions that must guide an ecological society as well as a just society.
The term “social justice” may be too narrow to encompass the kinds of social healing that must happen for us to be able to fully enact our love for the planet. Traditional areas of social activism that aim to address racism, poverty, inequality, misogyny, and so forth are important but they leave unchallenged key institutions like education, medicine, money, and property, often engaging them only in terms of equal access. It is a very tepid form of activism to strive for the equal application of existing systems, when the systems themselves are inherently oppressive whatever the race, gender, or sexual orientation of their subjects.
Is what feminists want, that women have equal representation in the ranks of polluters, vulture fund CEOs, sweatshop owners, and slumlords? Is what Black Lives Matter activists want, that the school-to-prison pipeline be open as widely to whites as to blacks in a punishment-oriented carceral society? I suppose if we take the current system for granted, then the answer would be yes. If we take for granted a horrible concentration of wealth, then certainly all races should have equal odds of being in the elite or the underclass. If we take for granted a global war machine, then I suppose women should be allowed to be generals just as men are. If we take for granted a planet-wrecking economy, then female, gay, black, disabled, and transgendered people should be just as welcome at its helm as white males.
While they surely would protest at the above suppositions, the liberal media upholds them implicitly by celebrating every time a female superhero gets to kick ass in a film, or a government appoints black, gay, or female people to high positions. But the original feminist and racial justice radicals had a bigger vision than winning equality in the existing system. The feminists didn’t want just to have equal status in the patriarchy; they wanted to transform the whole system. Civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just want African American men to be treated equally in the United States military; they wanted to end militarism and imperialism altogether. But today, a neutered mainstream version of both civil rights and feminism settles for an anodyne ideal of equality, shifting the occupants of our power structures around but leaving the structures themselves intact. They seem not to realize that these structures necessitate inequality, whether delineated by race, gender, or some other distinction. An exploitative system requires some people to be exploited. Racial prejudice, male chauvinism, nationalism, etc., enable and justify such a system, but eliminating these forms of bigotry won’t change the underlying dynamics. Someone else will be exploited instead.
I visit this issue for two reasons. First, I want to make clear that social justice must be more than the usual grab bag of identity politics issues. The kind of social healing we need requires the massive overhaul, probably the total reformation, of our systems of medicine, education, birth, death, law, money, and government. Second, the same pattern of reaching for superficial changes that don’t disturb the underlying system afflicts environmentalism just as much as it does social justice. So, just as a company can hire black, female, and LBGTQ executives at headquarters to administer a supply chain that exploits dark-skinned people in overseas factories and believe itself to be progressive, so also can it offset its carbon emissions by paying into a reforestation fund, all the while sourcing environmentally toxic products, and still call itself green.
The point is not to condemn the green rationalizations of corporations (or you or me); it is to illuminate the mindset of fundamentalism that enables those rationalizations. Fundamentalism of all kinds is a disengagement from the complexity of the real world, and I am afraid it is ascendant in many realms, not only religion. I even see it in various theories in alternative medicine, in the form of the Great Revelation of the One True Cause of all disease. (It’s parasites! Inflammation! Stress! Acidosis! Trauma!) Fundamentalism offers certainty, a lockdown of thought into a few prescribed pathways. The rush to The Cause, the retreat to unquestioned axioms taken on faith, does not serve us in a time of the disintegration of so much of what we thought we knew.
If we continue to uphold climate fundamentalism, then the symptomatic fever of climate change will only worsen, whatever macroscopic measures we take to address its proximate causes. We might get the numbers down (temperature, greenhouse gases); yet, like the patient who goes to the doctor and is told, “The tests all say you are healthy,” the disease will emerge in what we choose not to measure, what we cannot measure, or what is unmeasurable. We have to go beneath symptoms, and restore the foundation of ecological health: the soil, the water, the trees, and fungi, the bacteria, and every species and ecosystem and human culture on earth.
“That estuary used to be full of kelp and eels when we were kids,” said Stella. “It was full of all kinds of wildlife. Crabs, clams, horseshoe crabs—there was a mussel bed right over there—one time I was swimming in that bend and came face to face with an eel.”
That is what my wife told me on a visit to the estuary where the Narrow River meets the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, one of her haunts when she was growing up. It is a picturesque spot, surrounded by trees and sandy beaches, and I wouldn’t have known that it is a seriously degraded ecosystem if Stella hadn’t told me what it was like when she was a child.
Neither of us knows the reason why the eels disappeared. We shared a moment of sadness, and then Stella recalled another memory that somehow seemed to explain it. She and her friend Beverly would sometimes visit that part of the beach on what they called “rescue missions.” Groups of marauding boys would come and flip over all the horseshoe crabs that had crawled onto the sand, leaving them to die there helplessly. Stella and Beverly would flip them rightside-up again. “Whoever was doing it had no reason to whatsoever,” she said. “It was senseless killing.”
This is the kind of story that makes me feel like I’ve detoured onto the wrong planet.
We didn’t see any horseshoe crabs on this visit. They are a rare sight here now. I don’t know if that is because people killed too many of them, or because we are “harvesting” too much of their blood for hemocyanin. Or maybe it is because of the general deterioration of the ecosystem, or pesticide runoff, agricultural runoff, land development, pharmaceutical residues, changing patterns of rainfall caused by development or climate change.… Maybe the horseshoe crabs are sensitive to one of these, or maybe the creatures they eat are, or it could be that the sensitive one is a mollusk that serves a role in the reproductive cycle of a microorganism that keeps another microorganism in check that infects the horseshoe crab.
I feel quite sure that whatever the scientific explanation for the die-off of the horseshoe crabs and eels, the real reason is the senseless killing Stella described. I mean not so much the killing part, but the senseless part—the paralysis of our sensing function and the atrophy of our empathy. We feel not what we do.
The crabs and kelp and eels are all gone. The mind searches for the cause—to understand, to blame, and then to fix—but in a complex nonlinear system, it is often impossible to isolate causes.
This quality of complex systems collides with our culture’s general approach to problem-solving, which is first to identify the cause, the culprit, the germ, the pest, the bad guy, the disease, the wrong idea, or the bad personal quality, and second to dominate, defeat, or destroy that culprit. Problem: crime; solution: lock up the criminals. Problem: terrorist acts; solution: kill the terrorists. Problem: immigration; solution: keep out the immigrants. Problem: Lyme Disease; solution: identify the pathogen and find a way to kill it. Problem: racism; solution: shame the racists and illegalize racist acts. Problem: ignorance; solution: education. Problem: gun violence; solution: control guns. Problem: climate change; solution: reduce carbon emissions. Problem: obesity; solution: eat less and burn more calories.
You can see from the above examples how reductionistic thinking pervades the entire political spectrum, or certainly mainstream liberalism and conservatism. When no proximate cause is obvious, we tend to feel uncomfortable, often to the extent of finding some reasonable candidate for “the cause” and going to war against that. The recent spate of mass shootings in America is a case in point. Liberals blame guns and advocate gun control; conservatives blame Islam, immigrants, or Black Lives Matter and advocate crackdowns on those. And of course, both sides especially like to blame each other.
Superficially it is obvious that you can’t have mass shootings without guns, just as it is obvious that allowing civilian access to military assault weapons makes those shootings more deadly. However, to focus attention on gun availability bypasses more troubling questions that don’t admit easy solutions. Where does all that hatred and rage come from? What social conditions give rise to it? The furious debate about gun control so monopolizes U.S. political attention that these questions languish on the intellectual margins. If we do not address them, does taking away the guns really do much good? Someone could use a bomb, a truck, poison … is the solution then a complete lockdown of society, the imposing of ubiquitous and ever-increasing surveillance, security, and control? That is the solution we’ve been pursuing my whole lifetime, but I haven’t noticed people feeling any safer.
Perhaps what we are facing in the multiple crises converging upon us is a breakdown in our basic problem-solving strategy, which itself rests on the deeper narratives of the Story of Separation.
Learning of the die-off of the estuary, I myself felt the impulse to find the culprit, to find someone to hate and something to blame. I wish solving our problems were that easy! If we could identify one thing as the cause, the solution would be so much more accessible. But what is comfortable is not always true. What if the cause is a thousand interrelated things that implicate all of us and how we live? What if it is something so all-encompassing and so intertwined with life as we know it, that when we glimpse its enormity we know not what to do?
That moment of humble, powerless unknowing, where the sadness of an ongoing loss washes through us and we cannot escape into facile solutioneering, is a powerful and necessary moment. It has the power to reach into us deeply enough to wipe away frozen ways of seeing and ingrained patterns of response. It gives us fresh eyes, and it loosens the tentacles of fear that hold us in normality. The ready solution can be like a narcotic, diverting attention from the pain without healing the wound.
You may have noticed this narcotic effect, the quick escape into “Let’s do something about it.” Of course, in those instances where cause and effect is simple and we know exactly what to do, then the quick escape is the right one. If you have a splinter in your foot, remove the splinter. But most situations are more complicated than that, including the ecological crisis on this planet. In those cases, the habit of rushing to the most convenient, superficially obvious causal agent distracts us from a more meaningful response. It prevents us from looking underneath, and underneath, and underneath.
What is underneath the callous cruelty of those horseshoe crab flippers? What is underneath the massive use of lawn chemicals? What is underneath the huge suburban McMansions? The system of chemical agriculture? The overfishing of the coastal waters? We get to the foundational systems, stories, and psychologies of our civilization.
Am I saying never to take direct action because after all, the systemic roots are unfathomably deep? No. Where the unknowing, perplexity, and grief take us is to a place where we can act on multiple levels simultaneously because we see each dimension of cause within a bigger picture and we don’t jump to easy, false solutions.
When I wondered about the cause of the estuary die-off, a hypothesis may have jumped into your mind—climate change, the culprit du jour for nearly every environmental problem. If we could identify one thing as the cause, the solution would be so much more accessible.
As I was doing research for this book, I googled “effect of soil erosion on climate change,” and the first ten pages of results showed the converse of my search—the effect of climate change on soil erosion. I did the same for biodiversity, with the same result. Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat that enemy.
Carbon reductionism is like “germ reductionism” in medicine. What is the cause of, say, strep throat? Well, obviously it is the streptococcus bacterium, right? Problem: germ; solution: kill the germ. On one level this may be accurate, but consider what this approach renders invisible and leaves out. First, it leaves out the question why one person exposed to the germ gets sick, and another does not. Especially if someone gets repeated infections of strep, it might be more useful to see the germ not as the cause, but as one of the symptoms of the disease. It also ignores the effects of repeated antibiotic treatment, and whether that might somehow contribute to vulnerability to reinfection. (This is not idle speculation, in light of recent science establishing the relationship between body ecology and immunity. Body ecology—which includes a healthy gut microbiome—is seriously disrupted by antibiotics.)
In medicine, focusing on the immediate, linear cause of a disease can vitiate the possibility of a real cure, whether on an individual or epidemiological level. Consider a disease that looms far larger than strep in our collective consciousness today: Lyme Disease. Seeing it as an infection by a tick-borne spirochete, the appropriate technologies of control are obvious: avoid or destroy ticks, and kill the spirochete. To see the problem in another way can be very inconvenient or disruptive to the systems that embed the usual control-based responses. What is the real “cause” of Lyme? I don’t know, but it could include the following:
We can dig deeper and deeper. What is the cause of suburbanization? What is the cause of pollution? What is the mentality behind the extermination of top predators and the spraying of forests? Complex, nonlinear causal relationships connect these phenomena. For instance, the othering of nature encourages suburbanization, but it is also the other way around. Cut off from direct relationship to the land, the suburbanite who buys food grown thousands of miles away and needn’t even tread the soil to move from place to place will of course see nature as a spectacle or a threat.
One might even say that “the cause” of Lyme is everything and anything. Even the locution “the cause” is part of the problem, as it implies the separability of interdependently co-arising phenomena. I could even say the cause of Lyme Disease is modern children’s storybooks that present us from a young age with anthropomorphized animals wearing human clothes, living modern lives, and thinking human thoughts. Such storybooks entice us to take other beings on our terms and not theirs, and obscure the fact that the human normality that the storybook animals are playacting is extinguishing the actual habitats of those animals in the real world.
Now I am not saying that one should never address an obvious, linear cause, just as I am not saying that there is never a time for a fight. I am warning, rather, of the habit and conditioned response of addressing all problems in this way.
In ecology, which is the study of relationships and not things, every cause is also a symptom. Let’s take for example the steep decline of seagrass meadows, which are biodiversity hotspots and sequester more carbon per hectare than nearly any other ecosystem. Seagrass die-off is a cause of carbon loss and acidification, and it is a symptom of:
According to a friend who works with “watermen” (mostly crabbers) on the Chesapeake Bay, seagrass, shellfish, and crabs experience a massive die-off every time there is a hurricane or severe influx of highly sedimented freshwater into the bay. These irregular disruptions keep the ecosystems ever precarious. Well, that wasn’t much of a problem a few centuries ago, because:
Clearly, protecting and restoring seagrass is more than a matter of roping off protected areas, because seagrass is in relationship with everything that lives, including ourselves. Nor will our normal find-an-enemy strategy save the seagrass. It is tempting and convenient to blame the problem on “more intense hurricanes caused by global warming,” ignoring the complex of causes that intimately involves ourselves and the way we live. It is also easier to blame the watermen for their supposed greed, ignoring the complex economic causes (in which, again, we all participate) that drive the relentless conversion of nature into commodity into money. Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They’ll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.
Like most binary distinctions, that between symptom and cause breaks down under close scrutiny. Yet the distinction is still useful. Causes are symptoms and symptoms are causes, yes. So let us name as “symptom” that aspect of the cause/symptom complex that presents itself most obviously to our attention. To us, Lyme is calling most loudly. To another culture, the most alarming change might be the disappearance of the dogwoods in the mid-Atlantic forests, or perhaps some change in the songs of birds that you and I would never notice. Thus, what we observe to be happening in the world says as much about ourselves as it does about the world. It reveals what we think is important, significant, valuable, and sacred, and what is irrelevant or useless too. Put another way, what we see reveals how we see.
Nerdy aside: I am not in this book (or anywhere) taking the postmodern position that reality and truth are human cultural constructions—that how we see is the only determinant of what we see, or that there is no is-ness outside human seeing. Maybe the postmodern philosophers are right that there are no facts, but only meanings loaded with power dynamics, gender and racial oppression, etc. But what they cannot countenance is that we humans are not the only meaning-makers, not the only authors, not the only full subjective agents. Our ways of seeing, our stories and our myths, come from a source beyond our comprehension.
Among the many causal narratives available to apprehend Lyme, or climate change, or any other issue, our culture chooses the one that best preserves the status quo. The dominant culture adopts the narrative that sustains its dominance.
People tend to conceptualize problems in such a way as to validate the tools that are familiar and available to them. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have are antibiotics, you will always look for the germ. If all you have is the mindset of war, then you will always look first for an enemy.
Our society’s most potent and familiar tool is the quantitative methods of science. That is therefore how we frame the problem of climate change. We use numbers (such as average global temperatures) to prove it is happening, other numbers (CO2 emissions) to formulate responses, and yet other numbers (embedded in computer modeling) to forecast the future and guide policy. But is this the only tool? Is this even the right tool? We might doubt it, given the damage industrial civilization has caused the planet depends on the same regime of quantification. Through science we describe the world in numbers and mathematical relationships. Through technology we apply those numbers to the control of the material world. Through industry we convert the world into commodities, characterized by numerical specifications. Through economics we further convert all things into another number called its value.
We would like to solve climate change with methods and mindsets that are familiar to us, for to do so would preserve the foundation of society as we know it. These methods and mindsets, the quantified worldview, tell us that we can fix the situation by eliminating fossil fuels. Unfortunately, as I will discuss later, the mere elimination of fossil fuels will not deliver us from the ecological crisis. A deeper revolution is afoot.
Eliminating fossil fuels does not represent as thorough a change as the change required to halt ecocide here, there, and everywhere. Conceivably, we could eliminate carbon emissions by finding alternative fuel sources to power industrial civilization. It may be unrealistic upon deeper investigation, but it is at least conceivable that our basic way of life could continue more or less unchanged. Not so for ecosystem destruction generally, which implicates everything upon which modern technological society depends: mines, quarries, agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals, military technology, global transport, electronics, telecommunications, and so on. All of these must evolve into their next incarnation; some may even become obsolete.
The equation of “green” with “low carbon,” which maps a complex matrix of causes onto a single quantifiable variable, leads us to think that sustainability can mean to sustain life as we know it, life as it has been. It justifies and motivates the operating paradigms of green growth and sustainable development, which are essential to preserving our present economic system with its endless appetite for more resources. For that matter, it allows us to continue seeing the planet as composed of said “resources”—things that are here for us to use—as long as we exploit them in a way that doesn’t generate greenhouse gases. And, crucially, it contributes to an attitude of humanity in the driver’s seat, managing planet Earth like a machine, controlling the inputs and measuring the outputs. It invites a linear response to a nonlinear problem. But Earth is not a machine; it is alive, and it will remain hospitable to life only if we treat it as such.
In coming chapters I will present evidence that the climate effects of deforestation, industrial agriculture, wetlands destruction, biodiversity loss, overfishing, and other maltreatment of land and sea are far greater than most scientists had believed; by the same token, the capacity of intact ecosystems to modulate climate is much greater than had been appreciated. This means that even if we cut carbon emissions to zero, if we don’t also reverse ongoing ecocide on the local level everywhere, the climate will still die a death of a million cuts.
Contrary to the presupposition implied in my aforementioned Google search results, the health of the global depends on the health of the local. The most important global policies would be those that create conditions where we can restore and protect millions of local ecosystems. Today it is often the opposite; for example, global free trade treaties permit corporations to sue governments for lost profits from local environmental protections.
When we cast ecological healing in global terms, our gaze wanders away from the places we have loved and lost, the places that are sick and dying, the places we care about that are tangible and experientially known and real to us. It goes instead to distant times and places, and our local loves become at best instruments toward a larger end.
Why was Stella sad to see her beloved estuary depleted of life? Was it that it no longer grows kelp that will sequester carbon and mitigate climate change? Of course not. If so, it would be no great loss. It could be offset by planting a kelp farm or a forest somewhere else, or perhaps by installing giant carbon-sucking machines in every city. Then Stella would be happy, right?
My friend Seppi Garrett told me how he took his son fishing in the Conodoguinet Creek, his favorite haunt as a boy. To his alarm, he found out that the creek is impaired and people are warned not to let children get into the water. So he thought, “I’ll take him to the Yellow Breeches river instead,” only to discover that it is impaired as well. He said, “Then of course there is the Susquehanna. I feel so sad when I go there and see oil slicks on the water in the places I used to wade chest-deep to go fishing when I was a kid.” Seppi’s grief, indignation, and anger are driving him to become a kind of freelance applied ecologist, part of a movement of people who assist the recovery of damaged areas by accelerating succession, redirecting water, and altering species composition. We need millions of people to do that, to listen closely to land, to develop a relationship with it, and to put themselves at its service. Where does that level of commitment come from? Again I will ask, does the oil slick provoke Seppi’s grief because it signifies fossil fuel burning that generates carbon dioxide?
You can see how the dominant global carbon narrative is not necessary to generate environmental zeal, even for those who accept it as true. All the more, for the climate change skeptics we’ll visit in the next chapter.
I am sure something stirred in you reading Seppi’s words, even if your own special childhood place was the woods not the river. When we transmit our love of earth, mountain, water, and sea to others, and stir the grief over what has been lost; when we hold ourselves and others in the rawness of loss without jumping right away to reflexive postures of solution and blame, we are penetrated deep to the place where commitment lives.
This does not mean we don’t face a global ecological crisis. We do, and it far transcends what we call climate change. However, if everyone focused their love, care, and commitment on protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis. If we strove to heal and protect every estuary, every forest, every wetlands, every piece of damaged and desertified land, every coral reef, every lake, and every mountain, not only would most drilling, fracking, and pipelining have to stop, but the biosphere would become far more resilient too.