I still
may be blogging very irregularly for a few days, but I wanted to share
my thoughts on David Ehrenfeld's 1993 book Beginning Again
with you. I hope to have time to join the conversation on my Resilience
Open Thread soon; in the meantime, these thoughts will have to do.
Ehrenfeld is an old fashioned sort of guy, a bit nostalgic for memories
from his own youth and from what he has gleaned the world must have
been like before it became what it is today. By trade he is a
biologist, and you may recall I quoted him once before on his love for
the giant green turtles of Costa Rica:
Because the turtles
[I was
studying in Costa Rica] come out to nest after dark, much of my work
was done at night. There was a great deal of waiting between turtles,
plenty of time to sit on a driftwood log and think. In the first years
of my research I was often the only one on the beach for miles. After
ten or twenty minutes of sitting without using my flashlight, my eyes
adapted to the dark and I could make out forms against the brown-black
sand: the beach plum and coconut palm silhouettes in back, the flicker
of the surf in front, sometimes even the shadowy outline of a trailing
railroad vine or the scurry of a ghost crab at my feet. The air was
heavy and damp with a distinctive primal smell that I can remember but
not describe. The rhythmic roar of the surf a few feet away never
ceased -- my favourite sound. I hear it as I write in my landlocked
office in New Jersey. And then, with ponderous, dramatic slowness, a
giant turtle would emerge from the sea.
Usually I would see the track first, a vivid black line standing out
against the lesser blackness, like the swath of a bulldozer. If I was
closer, I could hear the animal's deep hiss of breath and the sounds of
her undershell scraping over logs. If there was a moon, I might see the
light glistening off the parabolic curve of the still wet shell. Size
at night is hard to determine: even the sprightly 180-pounders,
probably nesting for the first time, looked big when nearby, but the
400-pound ancients, with shells nearly four feet long, were colossal in
the darkness. Then when the excavations of the body pit and egg cavity
were done, if I slowly parted the hind flippers of the now-oblivious
turtle, I could watch the perfect white spheres falling and falling
into the flask-shaped pit scooped into the soft sand.
Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same
slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same
massive bulk with the beaked head and the same large, myopic eyes
rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours, days
and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene
beach, a Cretaceous beach -- the scene is the same. It is night. The
turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breath and
catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the
oceans form and grow. The turtles were coming here before here was
here. At Tortuguero I learned the meaning of place, and began to
understand how it is bound up with time.
Ehrenfeld is a very religious man, and the purpose of his book was to
be, in the tradition of Schumacher and Orwell, a prophecy for the next
century. "The business of prophecy" he says, "is not foretelling the
future; rather it is describing the present with exceptional
truthfulness and accuracy" to the point that "broad aspects of the
future have become self-evident".
His description of the present is eccentric, steeped in his personal
observations about life in the sciences and in academia, but
intriguing. He loathes "pervasive overmanagement", which he sees as
ruinously wasteful and the cause of horrifically bad decisions (we need
only look at Katrina to see the wisdom of this view). Bureaucracy and
hierarchy, he says, has allowed an entire unproductive and massive
segment of our population to bog down and interfere with real work, and
the "failure of unfavorable information to move upward in any
administration" is a direct cause of many modern man-made crises. He
laments the illusory belief that technology will magically solve our
energy or environmental problems, and the unwitting loss of deep,
centuries-old skills and knowledge that he believes will be sorely
needed in the future. He sees our contemporary society as
"power-worshipping, dominated by the myth of total control". He
believes (after witnessing first-hand the valiant but often ignorant
and inadvertently destructive actions of the Exxon Valdez clean-up
team) that there is no way to prepare for disasters -- our only hope is
to prevent them.
He is deeply concerned about loss of biodiversity, which he believes
makes the ecosystem brittle and extra vulnerable to crisis. He disdains
'experts' who fall victim to the propensity either to pontificate about
causes and about the future in complex-system disciplines where to do
so is absurd and dangerous (he cites economics, long-term weather
forecasting and psychology as such disciplines) or to veil themselves
in "dignified retreat" and refuse to say anything outside their narrow
specialty -- both methods designed to protect the cachet of expertise,
and both useless at best in dealing with contemporary problems where
their (modest) expertise might really be of value.
Finally, in the last three chapters, he begins to prophesy --
tentatively at first, then with great energy. After lauding the
pragmatism of Garrett Hardin's essay Tragedy
of the Commons, he applies it -- the only viable solution to
human overpopulation, he says, is "restrict the right to multiply".
Nothing else will work. By all means try voluntary measures first, but
if they don't work, "limit some human freedoms to preserve others more
precious". The solution to the Green Revolution, which, he believes,
has depleted and poisoned the soil and water and "destroyed farm
culture and farm communities and forced millions of knowledgeable
farmers to abandon farming and leave their land, in rich and poor
countries alike", is Wes Jackson's "dream of herbaceous
perennial polyculture" --
... a grain field that
would lie under the
same live vegetative cover year after year like a pasture. And, like a
good pasture, it would not be seeded to monoculture, but to a mixture
of plants, not only to in increase productivity, but to increase the
range of nutritive value, to reduce the dependence on purchased
nitrogen, to reduce vulnerability to pests and disease—in
short, to
benefit in every possible way from the principle of diversity.
Bold, a wedding of technology and natural wisdom, working with the land
instead of against it, needing no fertilizer, no chemical weeding, no
seeding, no pesticides, no irrigation. But the mix of new yet natural
plants that would be planted, once, in each area would be determined by
the local farmers who know this land best, so that instead of another
imposed and dislocating solution, this polyculture becomes their ticket
back to the land they love and know. No coward, Mr. Ehrenfeld.
The final chapter begins with a cautious rebuttal of the adequacy of
both "protection" and "management" approaches to conservation, and
asserts:
The ultimate success
of all our efforts to stop ruining nature will depend on a revision of
the way we use the world in our everyday living when we are not
thinking about conservation... a way that is compatible with the
existence of the other native species of each region.
Then he prophesies two scenarios, one pessimistic and the other
optimistic. He thinks, based on what he could see in 1993, that the optimistic
scenario was the more likely. But he says that if population and
industrial growth, urbanization, cultural homogenization, corporate
conglomeration, consumerism, military spending and mechanism of
agriculture continue to increase much beyond 2020, "it becomes a fairly
easy job to predict the fate of species and habitats on Earth." What
will prevail under this 'unlikely' scenario, he says, is "the weeds,
the pests and the vermin... the resilient species, the species of
upheaval, the ones we do not like and which are not good for us". The
explosion of information and the Internet will have limited impact
because most of this information, he says, is simply not useful, and
because information alone is insufficient to bring about change in
culture, behaviour and institutions.
Even
back in 1993 he could see the future of the US: "The American empire,
while nominally intact, has been taken over by its creditors as the US
sinks into a bottomless pit of debt". Barring a change in human
cultural direction in the next 25 years there will have to be
"disintegration of the extremely complicated and finicky economic,
industrial, social and political structure...supported by resources,
especially petroleum, that are waning, and by an environmental and
cultural legacy we foolishly took for granted, squandered and lost",
initially evidenced by "a global economic collapse".
"It is
like a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and
construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins". This is the Long Emergency, the Slow Crash, the Fourth Turning
that twelve years later other writers are describing in greater and
surer detail than Ehrenfeld could in 1993. What follows is an
astonishing (coming from someone who makes such a fetish of brutal
honesty and unemotional objectivity) heartfelt rant:
There
goes a chunk -- the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of
doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and
manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their
clients at enormous cost but don't help them very much.
There
go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and
professors who have nor prepared them for life in a changing world
after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary
school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated
teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant
and violent babysitting services.
There go the lawyers and their
hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and
regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly
intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.
There go
the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and
systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced
who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty
premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and
technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings,
roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts' monuments.
There
go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go
the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media
pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted
precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never
come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy
rate of spin.
The most terrifying thing about this
disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control
will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic
violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the
wealth that remains, but the last great rape of nature. What will make
it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a
cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.
It
is not hard to see 9/11 and Katrina as "chunks" of this inept, massive
flywheel. It is not hard to see Chernobyl, Bhopal, Rwanda, and Darfur
as chunks, either: "In the undeveloped world, many of these processes
of decline are already well underway with brutal effect."
But you want to hear about the other scenario, right? The optimistic one that Ehrenfeld believes is more likely?
This
second alternative is a transformation of the dream of progress to one
of honesty, resilience, appreciation of beauty and scale, and
stability, based in part on the inventive imitation of nature... It
will be advanced by countless people working separately and in small
groups, sharing only a common dream of life. They will tend to be
flexible, inventive and pragmatic, and most will have practical skills
-- carpentry, the building of windmills and small bridges, design and
repair of engines and computers, the recognition and care of soils, the
ability to teach. Nature will have entered their lives at an early age
and will remain as a source of joy. They will welcome the challenge of
the world that Orwell hoped for, a simpler, harder world. They will
devote their first energies to the places where they live.
Well, maybe. I take some consolation from a growing awareness that,
despite protestations from all sides to the contrary, it is apparent
that no one is in control, no
one knows what is going on. So this is not a political battle against
power, but more like a game of dodge ball, where the objective is to be
one of the few with the resilience, the intelligence, the new world survival skills
and the passion to evade the flying chunks of the flywheel we call
civilization, and, with the benefit of knowledge of what did not work,
to begin again.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
