| |
THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD

Five years ago, at the age of
48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about
the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to
read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put
together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world,
how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last
year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had
learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they
felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay
that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have
read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive
people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay,
but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the
unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy'
category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a
recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which
I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do
to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about.
It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to
Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which
stated:
"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more
than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we
now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.
A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required
if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is
not to be irretrievably mutilated."
At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that
just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place
will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic
change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change
than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and
this sudden has occurred four times before in human history:
- about 30,000 years ago, with the invention of the axe, the flint arrowhead and the spear
- about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of catastrophic agriculture and animal domestication
- during the Renaissance, with the invention of modern science
- during the industrial revolution, with the invention of automation
Each of these revolutionary inventions utterly changed the way humans lived. None of them, I think importantly, came about because of political or social actions or revolutions -- they were all (in the broad sense of the term) technology-based.
What we need urgently today is another such revolution, every bit as
radical as these four. We need to find, and rapidly implement, a
better, sustainable way to live.
This essay is organized around ten 'arguments'. I am not smart enough
to be able to distill the entire logic supporting these arguments into
this essay, but I will refer the reader to sources that do. The Bibliography
at the end of this essay contains the full list of these sources. Some
of the books and articles in this Bibliography contradict each other in
places. I freely admit to being selective in what I've taken from each.
I trust my instincts in that selection. My purpose is not to persuade
you, dear reader, but merely to show you what persuaded me.
The essay also contains a systems chart of 'How Nature Works' and another of 'Why Civilization Doesn't'.
These charts are my attempt to capture the interrelationship of the
forces that allowed the world to function as a self-managed system so
effectively for millions of years, including the first three million
years after the appearance of man, and the forces that have largely
replaced these natural forces since the dawn of civilization, driven
largely by the changes wrought by the four human revolutions noted
above.
Here are the ten Arguments:
The Truth About Nature: What We Have Forgotten
- Man is not Special, not the Crown of Creation, or a Species
Apart, but rather a fairly minor evolutionary adaptation to one
ordinary branch of the tree of life on Earth. The impact and 'success'
of this species is no more an indication of greater importance,
predestination or divine will than is the impact and success of the
mosquito, HIV, bacteria, cancer cells or the Plague.
- Our planet is a single self-managing organism. All life on
Earth exists to sustain, nourish and support all other life on Earth.
As with a human body or any other organism, that is only possible when
each component of the organism does its part, in balance and harmony
with the rest. In that sense the Earth is sacred, it demands and earns
respect and obedience to its 'laws' because that is essential to the
survival of all life.
- The Earth is full of sentient, intelligent, communicative,
emotional creatures. Most human moralities and religions seem to hold
that creatures with these attributes deserve freedom from harrassment,
suffering and enslavement, and the right to exist. Therefore much human
activity, which deprives all non-humans of these rights and freedoms,
is an atrocity no less despicable than human genocide, holocaust,
torture and slavery, and must be stopped.
- Small is beautiful, and place gives us identity: The
community as the basic political unit and
Natural Enterprise as the basic economic unit work best because they
can be self-selecting and self-managing, and are extremely adaptive. In
nature, the community teaches you what you need to live, it defines you
and gives you purpose, it anchors and connects you.
And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we
all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If
you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is
part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a
place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your
ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated,
nuclear-family,
locked house on 'private' property. Larger political units (states) and
economic units (corporations)
are inherently unwieldy, inflexible and less democratic. Because of
their sheer size they are detached, remote, and cannot possibly
understand or respond to our needs. Forged from both idealism and
cynical greed for power, these abominations serve no useful purpose
except to protect us from other large political and economic units (and
they do that poorly).
- We learn what we're shown, not what we're told. Our senses
provide us what we need to learn, to really understand, to be happy.
When we live in our minds, we close ourselves off from so much. Formal
education is
futile. To bring about change we need to show people something that
works better, and reconnect them with their senses, their imagination, the Earth.
The Truth About Civilization: The Problem and Its Root Cause
- Civilization was a well-intentioned response to a sudden
drastic shortage of human food (possibly arising from overhunting of
large game and/or the last ice age). But it was not an instinctive way
to live, and needed a lot of artificial constructs and controls to
work. Our civilization systematically brainwashes us into staggering
cultural homogeneity and imaginative poverty, and to believe ours is
the only way to live -- that there is no other human way. To do so it
must get us to forget or deny the 5 truths above, and teach us these
great myths:
- That our instincts are unreliable (what nature 'tells' us
to do), and logic and morality are infallible (what human codes tell us
to do);
- That life is a struggle of 'good vs. evil', and that we are inherently weak, selfish and lazy;
- That it's good to be 'normal' and to be like other
people, and that we're all part of society and not ultimately, terribly
alone;
- That we must be unconditionally obedient to our
'superiors', their hierarchy and their laws, or society and order will
collapse;
- That our well-being is appropriately measured by our material possessions and our ability to acquire more;
- That disparity of wealth, health and dignity is necessary
and inevitable and that with hard work 'have-nots' can become 'haves';
- That we must all work long, hard hours at unsatisfying jobs or we will all suffer and starve;
- That humans have an inherent right to all the land and all the resources of Earth (and even beyond);
- That history began with civilization, before which life
was short, fearful, nasty and brutish (and in nature and tribal
cultures, it still is).
- We
are instinctively responsive to, and responsible for,
everything we have control over. In nature that is the immediate
community -- what goes on outside is not one's business. But now that
we, as a 'global community' control the whole world we cannot respond,
cannot bear the commensurate responsibility. This conflict between our
instincts and reality, along with the stress of overpopulation and
separation from nature, has made us all mentally ill. This illness
manifests itself in violence and war, hatred, abuse, greed, jealousy,
and fear. We are helpless to do what we 'know' we must. It is like
facing 'Sophie's choice' (being asked by the Gestapo to decide which of
your children to spare from the gas chamber) over and over and over. We
cannot bear to know, so we turn off, we hide inside, we distract
ourselves. It is only when we don't know, and cannot even imagine, that
we can go on, and tolerate the world we have created. This makes it
easier for us to accept the brainwashing that ours is the only way to
live, to tolerate the abuses and outrages that weknow are going on
behind closed doors, and to accept the arguments of skeptics and
apologists and holocaust denyers that it's not really
that bad, or perhaps it's even good, or at least it's divine will so
it's beyond our control, there's nothing we can do about it, we're not really responsible
- As a consequence, we are poised, by the end of this
century, to create a world that contains one billion Americans and
fourteen billion people, and uses eight Earths worth of resources (at
current regeneration rates) just to meet human needs. A world that
will, as a direct consequence of this overcrowding and unsustainable
consumption, be preoccupied with catastrophic famines, epidemic (new)
human diseases, crop failures, cannibalism, crop failures, nuclear and
biological wars, water rationing and desertification, economic
depression, catastrophic terrorism, cascading weather disasters, and
the decline of democracy, constitutional liberalism, and the rule of
law. A world, arguably, not worth living in.
Forward Not Back: The Solution Process
- Solutions are needed that either directly address
overpopulation and unsustainable consumption, or address the causes of
these problems (see the Why Civilization Doesn't Work
chart). Or, alternatively, we could resign ourselves to the inevitable
crash of this horrible world (probably as a result of a new
catastrophic disease or nuclear or biological holocaust), and start
designing a post-apocalypse world that will allow the survivors to
carry on and perhaps learn from our mistakes. Solutions, throughout
history, have come in four 'flavours': innovative (new technologies),
social (changing people's minds), commercial (changing the economy) and
political (changing laws and regulations). Innovations have been,
throughout human history, by far the most effective and enduring.
Revolutionary change requires radical solutions -- solutions that
undermine, replace and ultimately destroy existing systems,
technologies, ideas and beliefs. But they must represent bold steps
forward, not nostalgic steps back to a pre-civilization world that is
no longer possible or desirable.
- If we hope to impose change on a world unready and unable
to save itself, enough of us must be informed, aware of the
consequences of our actions, skeptical, willing and able to learn from
nature, fully committed, confident we can do it, passionate in our
search for radical solutions and courageous in following through on
them.
Reframing History: Understanding How Man Lived in Harmony With Nature for Three Million Years
 To appreciate the truth about
nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter
through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you
need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told,
and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which
we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If
you're willing, let's see if we can do that.
Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex
evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact
the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House,
teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent
and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if
you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also
teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a
constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has
succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on
Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier
in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of
these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside
observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be
a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as
much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in
a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing
new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best
suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to
land. Gould's lessons are:
- Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in
which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if
they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for
short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than
those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have
the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter'
he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the
natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these
bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing
biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of
the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the
system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The
dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food,
and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart
above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress
so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity
again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next
big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary
change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and
sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a
regional or global level. So natural
selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures
that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to
the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of
experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out
of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire
extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore
the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is
called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history
of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction.
- In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also
precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last
two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions
and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust
particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused
the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another
meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing
drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series
of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to
the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three
million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which
currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about
the next Extinction Event prematurely.
- After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species
that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates
(which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging
from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it
looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species),
if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before
it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue
us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our
time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes
of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in
this machina, no matter how much we pray for one.
Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists
and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other
evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of
the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose,
result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single,
self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis,
so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of
most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant,
violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a
cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single
organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the
constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather
than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space.
In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe,
"short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three
million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his
book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence.
Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a
meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the
dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and
thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of
life
in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued
until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time
before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded.
Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an
Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow
mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per
week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages
and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned
to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to
feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand
years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago
to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each
ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which
prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the
effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition
for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic
disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize
and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so
horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human
life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming,
exhaustion of
arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation,
shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay
is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has
inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective
interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the
face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity.
So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with
each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity,
experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by
Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of
continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative
technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's
go back and try to understand the natural system.
How Nature Works

Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up
tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the
language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness.
Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of
civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread
and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned
to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive.
You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your
instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You
would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would
awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then,
probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command
your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends',
exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all
species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that,
for a while, protects
you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous,
guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play,
and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's
say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma
leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a
hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of
civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state
is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being,
self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness,
awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and,
to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems
shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and
gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized
talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert
peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of,
and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses,
physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian.
There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other
resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to
need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the
tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and
go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the
members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or
violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of
amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and
flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from
them, but you will not fear them.
That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring
more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but
because life is wonderful.
When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in
a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and
struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it
keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who
lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in
winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they
can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be
able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were
one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze
or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our
huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird,
it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries:
Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no
longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed.
The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous.
Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we
have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we
live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory
homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich
sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses,
opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights,
smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times
when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive,
closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge.
Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance
(because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe
that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the
planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly
have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart,
sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just
doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and
historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man,
scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths
of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although
our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has
so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is
very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary
intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound
emotion.
Jeff Masson's work
on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants
Weep,
supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and
observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed
that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our
bigger brains had led us to
be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or
fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed
about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and
impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and
well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it
hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal
testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label
animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so
in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific
evidence
that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion,
long-lasting
memory and astute reasoning.
I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and
emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves,
whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's
book Mind of the Raven
is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do
not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to
improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I
hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or
that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am
incredulous
-- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated
fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part
of 'all things
natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind
acceptance
of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I
know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and
beliefs,
but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich
systematically debunking
the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will
at
least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what
other
animals have to teach us, and to say to us.
In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response
to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater
sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible
that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that
they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that
they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then
don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do --
maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and
clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that
they don't have to -- maybe
we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were
uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise
instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our
strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals
always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How
sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes",
"no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to
say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and
our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a
better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology
to do so.
What We've Lost, and Forgotten
Another truth about nature is the importance of community and of place.
Civilization has supplanted our sense of community -- the essential
unit of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth --
with constructs that allow greater command and control over all
civilized humans and all human endeavour: The family, the corporation,
the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear
social unit that is undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed)
and helpless (it can't survive without interacting with larger social
groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large,
hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally
distributed) and omnipotent. By giving the adult (usually the father)
the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states
are able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power for
themselves, which is essential to maintaining order in a world of six
billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community
competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and
with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other,
so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides.
When we say we live in a 'community' today, it doesn't mean a group of
people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally
lucky), it means the homogeneous yet unintegrated collection of nuclear
family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community
has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and
commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even
really be called 'members'. We are, however, members of a family, and
members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation
(employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its
natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers
planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere
else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except
the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives -- we
move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the
day we commute from our 'homes' on identical-looking highways to
identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of
community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either.
In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community
is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born
into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the
approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and
find another community (or form your own). You belong
to a community -- a much stronger bond than mere membership. The
community (like the amnesiac tribe described earlier) teaches you what
you need to live, defines you
and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you.
And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we
all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If
you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is
part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a
place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your
ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated,
nuclear-family,
locked house on 'private' property. A house is not a home. And even
though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a
home either, it is not a real place.
Very few of us in the civilized world really belong
to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In
nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and
to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to
belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is
what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to the Earth, have three
million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community
and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising
that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they
belong and found their place are quite passionate about it -- they will
defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if
necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most
creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and
unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their
space with communities of all other species that also call that place
home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and
community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on
Earth is sacred. The love that you have for your place and your
community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is
what gives your life meaning. There is no 'Tragedy of the Commons'
in nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is
somebody's home, a part of somebody's community, and must be respected.
Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual
of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It 'belongs'
to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part.
Now I know how David Abram must have felt writing The Spell of the Sensuous.
It's all too hard, maybe impossible, to explain the truth about nature
in words and charts and pretty pictures. It's like trying to describe
life outside to someone who has lived their whole life in a prison. A
prison with no bars or locks but which, astonishingly, no one walks
away from. I can't tell you, but nature can show
you her truth. But you need to let her. If you live most of your life
indoors, in a car, in a city, inside your own mind, it will be hard,
like learning a new language when you're old. To understand you will
have to:
- Spend time with her, in wilderness (not just a park or a cottage or a summer camp)
- Open your senses, and re-learn to really see, hear, smell, taste and feel again
- Re-learn to trust your instincts: For three million years they showed man the way to live
- Find a real community and a place in nature to which, even if only for awhile, you can belong
- Silence the noise in your head
- Re-learn to imagine what is real, what is really going on that you can't see, and what is possible
- Learn to think critically and profoundly beneath the issues and distractions of the day to what really matters
- Find the courage to challenge a culture that doesn't make sense to you, to be different, to be fearless, to be genuine, to be yourself, and not like everyone else (rational and moral and superficial and passive)
You don't have to do all these things. If you do a few, even a couple,
the others will probably happen naturally. I don't expect many people
to understand or buy any of this. The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily
living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy,
unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and
that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds,
walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful
life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too
insane an idea for most people to accept. Who are we to throw away 30
millennia of civilization and try to build something new based on a
three million year old idea? There must be a good reason why the world
is the way it is. We're humans, we're the Crown of Creation, if there
was a better way to live we'd have found it. We can't change it anyway,
we don't have the power, it's not our place. And we're too busy just
doing our jobs, just trying to get by. Don't bother us. It's too hard.
You're asking too much of us. Go bug someone else.
OK. So don't listen to me. Listen to the quiet, nagging voice inside
you. The voice that resonates with your three million year old DNA,
that's telling you that something is very wrong, that life should be
better, happier, less of a struggle than this.The truth about nature is
that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her
what to do. And waiting to welcome us all home.
Why Civilization Doesn't Work, and Why We Invented It
 I have previously explained what we lost when, thirty thousand years ago,
in response to a sudden shortage of big game, we gave up our
hunter-gatherer cultures, started the tedious and back-breaking work of
agriculture, invented civilization and tried to convince everyone that
this strange and unintuitive new society was a good and necessary way
to live. Although the 'history' we are taught in school starts with the birth of civilization, and treats everything before that as a non-event, books like Daniel's Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, Richard Manning's Against the Grain, Derrick Jensen's A Truth Older Than Words and
the essays of Jared Diamond have started to develop a credible, broader
picture of human history, explaining that the transition of
three-million-year-old homo sapiens
from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler was a traumatic one, and led
inadvertently to consequences of great suffering and misery and
ecological stresses that today imperil the survival of all life on the
planet.
This picture looks something like this: We learned that for
civilization to work, we had to live closer together, and to work in a
coordinated way in new and difficult jobs. To do so we needed to evolve
new, abstract, technical languages and create hierarchies of command
and control. The crowding, the coercion, and the development of very
successful agricultural technologies had three immediate consequences:
High levels of physical and emotional stress (nature's way of
signalling and dealing with overcrowding), excess food (which in turn
led to exploding population, and even more crowding), and,
paradoxically, recurring and catastrophic shortages, as the new
monoculture crops occasionally and spectacularly failed. Thus the
vicious cycle shown in the chart above began.
With more and more people crammed into civilization's new 'cities',
opportunistic diseases that required proximity quickly evolved and
blossomed into epidemics. The human forms of poxviruses, nature's
ubiquitous species-specific population regulator, became endemic and
killed over a billion of the first few billion humans born into
civilization. The crowding and the loss of community and purpose and
place led to mental illness, to new physical ailments (like tooth decay
and heart disease) connected to the loss of variety in our diet, and to
addictions, which are now so common and widespread that we have come to
think of them as normal, and only notice them in the descendants of
tribal cultures most recently conquered and forced to adapt to
civilization's ways, where their symptoms are most tragic and most
obvious. The crowding also produced continuous violence and war, as
fighting broke out over increasingly scarce land and resources, and the
ethic that had held for three million years that land was sacred, and
belonged to the community that was already there, was replaced by an
ethic of acquisition, of justifiable genocide of uncivilized cultures,
and of manifest destiny to conquer and seize every acre of land to meet
civilization's insatiable needs. Catastrophic crop failures led to
famines, previously unknown on the planet, and the 'fear of not having
enough' caused everyone to try to hoard surpluses, and prompted those
higher in the new hierarchies to demand more than their share, and to
use their power to establish and preserve a staggering new inequality
of health and wealth.
Social order, which for three million years had been egalitarian and
instinctive and built around the tribal community, started to break
down as the new larger social structures did not work on the same
principles. New social principles therefore had to be developed: New
religions taught that suffering was normal and divine will; New laws
and punishments and prisons were introduced to enforce obedience to the
rules set by those at the top of the hierarchy; New educational and
moral codes taught that war is honourable and inevitable, that some
people deserve more wealth and security than others, and that
conformity and other qualities that keep order and discipline are
'virtues'; The nuclear family unit was conceived to promote patriarchy
and hierarchy as the natural human order, and to replace the loss of
the tribal community. And all of these new systems portrayed nature as
dangerous, brutal, something that had to be conquered and subdued in
the interest of man, and portrayed man as divine, above and apart from
all other life, so that man was absolved from the guilt, the
responsibility and the intuitive distress over destroying nature and
enslaving the tribal peoples and animals that got in the way of global
dominion by 'civilized' man, in his insatiable need for more land, more
resources and more slave labour to feed the ever-increasing masses. And
man, social, adaptable, gullible creature that he is, bought it all. He
learned to forget his true nature, to distrust his instinct, and to
believe that civilization, despite its vicious cycle, was the only way
to live.
It's only in the last century that the wisdom of this new civilization
ethos has been seriously questioned by more than a few eccentric
individuals. This century has seen the worst wars, the worst famines,
the worst epidemics, the greatest suffering of any century in
civilization's brief 300-century history, and the lack of progress has
started to lead many to a sense that something is terribly wrong. In The Axemaker's Gift,
Burke & Ornstein reveal that human innovativeness, which originally
helped man adapt and live better, is now used as a tool to entrench
authority and concentrate power. In The Unconscious Civilization
John Ralston Saul explains that the political and economic and
corporate systems we built to make our lives better have now enslaved
us, and are out of our control. In Ockham's Razor,
Wade Rowland argues that civilization has dehumanized humans, and that
science and technology have accelerated rather than slowed this process
in the last millennium.
In People Before Profit,
Charles Derber recounts the cautionary tale of the 18th century robber
barons and warns that corporatism is once again driving much human
activity, in ways that benefit only a tiny elite and impoverish all
other life on Earth. In When Corporations Rule the World,
David Korten shows how corporations, which we invented to try to
improve the production and distribution of resources, have lost sight
of their purpose and now control us, while producing ever-greater
inequality of wealth. The Worldwatch Institute, in its annual State of the World reports, dispassionately identify the measures of growing ecological collapse. And in The New Rulers of the World,
Jon Pilger shows how much control now resides in a tiny number of
people -- fewer than a million -- with a vested interest in
perpetuating the vicious cycle above.
Richard Manning's Against the Grain
explains how grain surpluses were the first human currency, used to
bribe some people into beating down others to establish the first human
hierarchies, and describes the incredible vulnerability of monoculture
agriculture to catastrophic failures that has led to soul-destroying
famines, wars, unimaginable suffering, and even cannibalism -- and
ultimately to the political systems that perpetrate these disasters and
lead to overpopulation, modern concentration-camp style factory farms,
and staggering inequality of power and wealth.
As these and other authors paint a disturbing picture of civilization's
well-intentioned social, political and economic folly, other writers
describe civilization's devastating impact on our psyches. Edward Hall,
in The Hidden Dimension,
explains the psychological impact of overcrowding as a natural stress
reaction common to all animal species. The purpose of this reaction is
to induce in creatures that have overpopulated a series of hormonal
changes that reduce fertility, increase aggressiveness (to spread them
out), and increase susceptibility | |