A
significant aspect of my job is increasing business' and the public's
awareness of the issues and opportunities to become more
environmentally sustainable. As I mentioned last week, with
businesspeople I try to do this by portraying irresponsible,
unsustainable behaviour as risky, and positioning business
sustainability as a risk mitigation and resilience strategy.
If
I'm honest, though, I have to admit that the amount of change necessary
to really make our economy sustainable is almost certainly beyond the
capacity of our economic system to achieve. Business needs to be
'persuaded' to be responsible and sustainable, not just by taxes and
regulations and incentives and strategic arguments about reducing risk,
but also by a drastic change in customer buying behaviour.
How
do we achieve that change in buying behaviour? After all, we, the
customers, are also mostly producers of some goods or services in a
business. As customers we respond the same way that we do as
businesspeople -- we change our behaviour only when we have no other
choice, or when something so astonishing occurs that it changes our
whole worldview.
When it comes to our worldview on
responsibility and sustainability, we are informed by how we perceive
ourselves relative to our society and our environment. Our modern,
individualistic Western culture teaches us that we are responsible only
for and to ourselves and those we love ("we are not our neighbour's
keeper") and that 'the environment' is something apart from us,
something that we manage, own, and keep under our control.
This
is analogous to our brain's belief that it -- 'we' -- are something
apart from our bodies, and that we are somehow not responsible for
'them' or 'their' well-being. Such a belief is ludicrous -- and we
cannot live without or apart from a healthy natural environment any
more than our brains can live well if the rest of our bodies are dying,
poisoned or exhausted. But human culture and belief systems are
mealleable, and we can, with enough propaganda and reinforcement of
others, be persuaded to believe almost any absurd idea.
There is
evidence that human societies and other creatures not living wildly out
of balance with their ecosystems have an utterly different worldview,
one that recognizes that they are inherently and absolutely a part of
those ecosystems, one that respects the ecosystem and all-life-on-Earth
as sacred and inseparable from them.
But now we live in
such artificial, overcrowded circumstances that many of us have no
concept of a natural environment -- we spend so little time in places
even remotely natural we cannot even imagine what it means to be a part
of a place, to belong to it, to be intimately and utterly connected to
everything else in it. Our human constructs are fragile, unsustainable,
and disposable -- we can no more be a part of them than a brain can be
a part of a robot. If we were somehow able to raise and sustain, for
awhile, a brain in a robotic, artificial 'body', that fragile creature
would not be human, and it would be unable to form any attachment to
any 'living' creature. Likewise, humans raised in fragile artificial
environments cannot establish or even really imagine a connection or
attachment to all-life-on-Earth, because they are essentially apart
from it, separated, detached.
There are now not enough natural
places left to reconnect most of us, even if there were time and will
to do so. The nature visits that we send our children on as part of
their schooling don't reconnect them -- they merely reinforce the
social illusion that the environment is 'apart', separated from us like
animals in a zoo are separated from us by cages.
Is it possible
for us to imagine being a part, given the three million years of our
species' history as a part, which is profoundly coded in our DNA and
just waiting to be remembered? Alas, I don't think so. We are by nature
experiential learners. Without direct experience, 'being a part' is
only something we can dimly 'remember', the way we 'remember' when we
walk into a rainforest that this is, somehow, our natural home.
If
we want to be of help, making the world a better place, we need to do
what we do when we want to learn a new and strange language -- immerse
ourselves in it to the exclusion of our 'normal' surroundings. That
means immersing ourselves in a natural surrounding with as few
trappings of civilization as necessary, living simply in
self-sufficient, responsible community with people we love who seek to
rediscover and share the primal worldview of being a part of
all-life-on-Earth. That doesn't mean isolation or deprivation or 'going
back' -- Internet information and communications, renewable energy,
shelter and appliances sufficient for comfort and food preservation and
preparation can actually help us do more with less.
By doing
this, rediscovering working models of how to live and make a living
sustainably, responsibly and joyfully, we can, in a way, reinvent the
world. Not our civilized world -- it's almost certainly too late for
that. Rather, the world that the survivors of the collapse of our
civilization will inherit, hungry for models that work.
We
can't save the world, but we can help those who will create the next,
humbler, simpler human society, one that can learn from our mistakes.
And
in the meantime, in that joyous, astonishing reconnection with
all-life-on-Earth, we can rediscover who we are, and why we're here,
and all the wondrous things that we've forgotten.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
