The famous Pogo cartoon from Earth Day 1971 (c) Walt Kelly
The
best thing about the job I just retired from has been the opportunity
to speak with some of Canada's business leaders, specifically about
sustainability. While I don't expect them to be far enough ahead in
their thinking to recognize the imminence of civilizational collapse, I
do
expect them to be informed about how the world really works -- the
current state of our political, economic, technological, educational,
social, and environmental systems and the prognosis for the future --
since this has profound implications for their organizations.
I find them to be, generally, better informed than the average
Canadian, and, mostly, very uneasy about the future. I also find them
to be disturbingly short-term focused and in profound denial about the
implications of what they know to be true for the future of the planet,
and hence for their organizations.
A year ago I co-wrote a paper
on business risk and sustainability that was presented at the Prince's
Trust forum in London, England. The three principal theses of the paper
were that:
- ecological
sustainability and business sustainability are co-dependent
(can't have one without the other),
- the primary objective
of any business (analogously to the primary objective of any organic
creature) is to sustain itself -- to "stay in business", and
- nothing can exist
independently of the complex environment in which it 'lives' and of
which it is a part.
These are obvious, even tautological, to anyone who understands the
basics of business and of how complex adaptive systems operate. But if
you accept them, it follows that it is in everyone's interest that we
optimize the health and well-being of our entire interdependent
planetary environment and all of the creatures in it. The idea of
ruthless "crush the enemy" competition, and of "externalizing" costs to
another country or to the "external" environment or to a future
generation, in the interest of maximizing short-term profit growth, in
this context, is absurd.
Yet we go on doing it. And political, business and religious 'leaders'
encourage us to compete, to crush the competition, to externalize our
costs to 'others', and to relentlessly and exponentially grow by every
measure of growth. Why?
Perhaps it's for the same reason we go on eating meat, or at least eggs
and dairy products, long after and despite knowing the cruelty it
inflicts on trillions of sentient creatures, year after year, and
depite knowing that it is environmentally wasteful and irresponsible on
a massive scale, especially the way it has come to be managed by the
horrific industral agriculture oligopoly.
We call the people we think foolish or ideologically misguided or just
pathological (like the industrial agriculture oligopoly I just referred
to in the last sentence) "them",
to distinguish "them" from "us" who presumably are doing the right
things, doing our best, willing to help solve the problems if only the
'leaders' would tell us what to do, and 'lead' us.
So we
have this disconnect between what we know and what we do
(which gets worse as we become 'leaders' and come to know more), and
this dysfunctional and paralyzing co-dependence between 'leaders' and
'followers',
neither of whom are taking responsibility to act sustainably.
The mainstream media are blandly and uncritically documenting this
absurdity to the point that, for most of us who all of this is dawning
on, these media have become unbearable, terrible reminders of this
collective dysfunction, creative inertia, destructive momentum and
pathology with which we are all, if we were to be honest, complicit.
The 'news' of the mainstream media, as a result, is oversimplified,
sensationalized, self-censored to omit any information that cannot be
dumbed down to a one-sentence headline, and unactionable. It's grating,
worthless, and disgraceful.
What's going on here?
Well, first, we have political 'leaders' preoccupied with doing what
will get them re-elected in 1-5 years. Their objective is to be seen to
be doing something effective, not to actually do anything (doing
something costs money and incurs risk). Because of the execrable media,
their actions and propaganda (advertising and press releases) are
focused on posturing and trying to make potential opponents look more
incompetent and dangerous than they are. Their funding, generally,
depends on campaign contributions from large corporations which expect
regulations and subsidies that favour them, and deregulation of
anything that interferes with their untramelled pursuit of limitless
growth and profitability. These 'leaders' inevitably are cynics,
do-nothings, alarmists, and corporatist toadies -- anyone else thinking of
playing a political leadership role is quickly discouraged
or crushed by moneyed interests. There is only one notable remaining
exception in the US, Dennis Kucinich, and he is systematically
ridiculed in the mainstream media.
Then, we have business 'leaders' preoccupied with doing what will
achieve double-digit annualized profit growth every quarter for the
next year or two. They cannot afford to look further than that.
Whatever they may care about sustainability (and in my experience most
do care about and worry about this) is pushed to the background.
Shareholders will simply not tolerate long-term thinking that
jeopardizes short-term profits, because most shareholders
are only investing for short-term gains.
Third, we have an institutional education system that discourages
independent thinking, and prepares young people for a life of learned
helplessness, wage slavery, mindless consumption, escapism, absurd
oversimplification of how the world works, and obedience to 'leaders'.
Once the school system is finished with them, the media take over,
delivering identical messages of the only acceptable ways to
think, live and behave. They all do this because they believe that this
is the best way to create 'productive' citizens, and, because this is
the way they
were brought up. They lack the imagination
to conceive of any other way of informing people.
It's
all self-perpetuating. 'Leaders' who know better (or should), doing
what they must do in their own short-term self-interest, instead of
acting sustainably and responsibly. Educators and media lying (mostly
by omission) about what is really happening in the world because it's
too difficult, and because most of the rest of us, citizens and
'followers', either haven't the capacity to understand or don't care to
understand.
Those of us fortunate enough to have learned what is really
going on are stymied by massively complex and opaque political and
economic systems that provide no simple means of acting sustainably and
responsibly, of becoming part of the solution instead of part of the
problem. We essentially have no choice but to be complicit. Couple that
with the fact that most people are incapable of discussing the complex
issues of the day intelligently, and it's not surprising that most of
us start to wonder:
- Is it just me?
Is this terrible knowledge that I've acquired actually true, even
though most people either don't know it or don't believe it?
- What can I do that
will actually make a difference, when all the choices I have either
make an insignificant difference or make matters even worse?
- Why are the 'leaders'
doing, essentially, nothing, except making the situation worse by
claiming, absurdly, that what is needed is a return to economic
growth?
It's easy to blame 'them', the 'leaders' who are doing nothing or
worse, and the soporific and infantile media. But (with the exception
of a few wingnut ideologues) 'they' are just as caught up in this
massive and self-perpetuating dysfunction as the rest of us. The
bloated, corrupt corporatist economic and political oligopolies show
this dysfunction at its ugliest, cruelest, most dishonest and
exploitative and self-serving, but we are all complicit, and ridding
the system of all the corporatists, even if that were possible, would
probably not significantly improve matters. These systems are bigger
than all of us, no one controls them, and they have an unstoppable
momentum.
We do what we must, and until there is absolutely no alternative to
change, we cannot and will not change -- not enough to 'reform' our
industrial growth society and 'save' civilization anyway. The power of
our 'leaders' is a myth -- they too do what they must, in their
short-term personal interest, and in fact they can't do very much
anyway.
My friend Ivor thinks
it's like a war, and that you have to be psychopathic or inured to the
terrible violence of the world to be a party to it. His answer is that
it has to be made personal,
that if both 'leaders' and 'followers' could really see the
consequences of their behaviour and inaction, they would quickly change.
I don't think so. I am of course angry at "them", the real psychopaths,
like the people who run ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Koch Industries, Dow
Chemical and other megapolluters, the ADM/Cargill/ConAgra Industrial
Agriculture oligopoly, the military/industrial complex, the Tar Sands
conglomerate, the climate change deniers and their cynical funders, the
right-wing political reactionaries and the religious wingnuts. But they
are the minority of 'leaders', and if we think they are the difference
between changing the Industrial Growth society and being run over by
it, we give them far too much credit.
We are not going to be 'saved' by 'leaders', any more than we are going
to be saved by human ingenuity, technology, market forces, a sudden
global consciousness-raising, or the Rapture. We are all complicit, but
we can't 'save the world' either. As John Gray says in Straw Dogs,
we humans have not changed and cannot change what we are, what we do,
how we behave or what we value. We are doomed by the coding in our DNA
to continue along our inexorable path of self-destruction, and to
inflict large-scale but ultimately transitory damage on our planet in
the process. He concludes:
Humans
cannot save the world, but this is no reason for despair. It does not
need saving... Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not
obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct.
When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the
human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on
destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to
spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
There is not much point, then, in getting angry at the psychopaths, or
being disappointed in or infuriated by our 'leaders'. We had best come
to grips with our grief, get on with our astonishing lives, and do what
we can to make the world better in small, personal, collective, local
ways. I have already written about what I intend to do, since I have
the rare luxury of knowledge and time to do more than most. I will do
what I can, working with others, to end factory farming and the
devastation of the Tar Sands, to create some models of better ways for
the survivors to live, free of the systems and scourges we struggle
with.
I am moving past grief and anger and helplessness, and am happier and
more connected and full of love than I have ever been. And I would
encourage you to appreciate what can be done, that it's not
just you feeling this sorrow and rage and sense of futility, and that
most people, despite their ignorance and incapacity and imaginative
poverty, are trying to do their best.
And I'd encourage you as well to get away from the noise and madness of
our civilization and explore, gently,
with those you love, wild and natural places that will help you
reconnect with your emotions and instincts and all-life-on-Earth, and
realize who you really are, and what you're meant to do. No leaders
needed.
|
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
