Mourning the Land

Any reading of the ecological literature makes clear that ours is a time of significant ecological loss. Evidence accrues that the sixth mass extinction is well under way, that global ecosystem productivity is in steep decline, and that the biosphere as a whole is becoming irreparably damaged by human actions.

In addition to being the subject of intense scientific scrutiny, global environmental change and regional ecological decline are increasingly embedded within everyday experience, evoking strong mental and emotional responses across the population.

Although most people are generally aware that climate change is occurring, it continues to seem distant: something that will happen to others, in another place, at some unspecified future date. Psychologists refer to this idea as ‘psychological distance’. 

Terms such as ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ draw attention to the global scale, rather than the personal impacts. Additionally, the signal of climate change is obscured by the noise of daily and seasonal weather variation. All this makes the issue easier for people to push aside, particularly when faced with other pressing life issues.

Perhaps one of the best ways to characterize the impacts of climate change on perceptions, is the sense of loss. Loss of relationship to place is a substantial part of this. As climate change irrevocably changes people’s lived landscapes, large numbers are likely to experience a feeling that they are losing a place that is important to them - a phenomenon called solastalgia. 

This psychological phenomenon is characterized by a sense of desolation and loss, similar to that experienced by people forced to migrate from their home environment. Solastalgia may have a more gradual beginning due to the slow onset of changes in one’s local environment. 

Hence, we can argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss, is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts; and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. 

How to grieve ecological losses well - particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing - is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

The loss of local knowledge, or traditional ecological knowledge, may be a key trigger for ecological grief. Various groups have reported having lost confidence in the seasonal rhythms of the weather; and in their ability to ‘know it’. Such experiences are often associated with anxieties related to the long-term future.

Indigenous people, in particular, identify feeling deep sadness and distress that much of their environmental knowledge - gained from generations of sharing; with ‘on-the-land’ observation and learning - are suddenly shifting and eroding. 

Elders express worry about giving advice around travel routes and weather conditions, as parameters for prediction and risk, have shifted so much in recent years that they no longer have confidence in their knowledge. This causes grief at the loss of their own identity associated with ‘knowing the land’.

However, ecological grief should not be seen as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we should find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives.

Being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place. Indigenous populations have been, and continue to be, the tripwire for humanity. City dwellers, in an urbanizing world, are in denial if they think that the effects of climate change is a rural problem. 

Cities, as the highest concentrations of people, will be particularly vulnerable. Laboratory experiments have demonstrated a causal relationship between heat and aggression. As the temperature goes up, so does aggression; which also reduces the ability to resolve conflict without violence. 

Furthermore, research indicates that many individuals identified feeling anticipatory grief, for ecological changes that had not yet happened. In these cases, grief for anticipated future ecological losses is also tied to grief over future losses to culture, livelihoods and ways of life. 

Given that we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss, and that these losses will not end any time soon, we can anticipate - along with a small, but growing, number of scholars - that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the Anthropocene. 

To bear witness to ecological losses personally, or to the suffering encountered by others as they bear their own losses, is to be reminded that climate change is not just an abstract scientific concept. Rather, it is the source of much hitherto unacknowledged emotional and psychological pain, particularly for people who remain deeply connected to, and observant of, the natural world.

Sacred Convergence

Much has been written about the juncture where psychology and shamanism converge. Both are instances of the same primordial image or instinctual pattern known the world over. Both shamanism and psychology acknowledge the importance of the sacred in healing processes. Both recognize how the sacred is manifest in wild nature and areas where modern humans have fallen out of consistent connection with wholeness. Both observe how loss of contact with the sacred results in loss of soul, and understand that recovery requires initiation and successful integration of direct experience.

Shamanism defines health as being in balance with the sacred, and lack of health as violation of the will of the sacred. Psychology characterizes the sacred as an experience of something that evokes rapture, awe, exaltation or ecstasy; something that is even dreadful in its intensity and power. As opposed to the profane or ordinary, the sacred is often perceived in modern culture as something alien or other; while indigenous and earth-based cultures make no distinction between the sacred and the profane. In urban life, at least, the sacred is not something we experience in our busy everyday routines; unless we somehow slow ourselves to witness a sunset or feel into a sudden sense of longing or love.

Only then, in the spaciousness of attention, are we aware we have generally tuned out the sense of something powerful and unknown. Something sacred often invokes a feeling of mystery beyond the power of words to describe. The term numinous is a connotation for the sacred, describing it as something which provides an experience or alteration of consciousness independent of human will; arousing, affecting, bedazzling or blinding one to other realities. Both sacred and numinous are words connected to the idea of soul; the creative, sacred life force that imbues all things with energy and meaning.

The soul is not just an element, region or dimension; but rather a perspective of deepening, noticing, penetrating and insight. The soul can extended beyond humanity to the world at large, to forms and objects around us, whether natural or man-made. Each thing has a spark of soul at its core. Psychology is deeply tied to soul; so much that we can refer to psychologists as doctors of the soul. Similarly, the province of the shaman [as technician of the sacred] is disorders of the soul. We can call shamans masters of ecstasy, they are great specialists in the human soul; they see it, know its form and its destiny.

Modern culture has repressed the contents of the unconscious and summarily forgotten it entirely; disregarding the magic and mystery there. Conversely, shamans rely on the power that issues from the sacred to conduct their healing activities. Yet, the enormity of the split between urban lifestyles and the vast depth of the psyche looms over modern humans. Modern humans do not understand yet that, the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task; which must be accomplished if they wish to preserve their civilization. The only way to address the deep loss of connection to soul, they experience as a species, is to reestablish their connection to the sacred.

In the physical or material world, the sacred manifests through wild nature as an infinite source of life and creativity; waxing and waning in eternal cycles of death and rebirth. Shamans read nature, regarding and interpreting the elements and events that communicate through soul at all times and places. Modern humans’ increasing analytic thinking and desire for progress through the manipulation of the natural world is devastating to their well-being. Their lives are dominated by reason, who is their greatest and most tragic illusion. By the aid of reason, they assure themselves, they have conquered nature.

As humans, of all cultures, our connection to nature is ancient and undeniable. At the most profound levels of the unconscious, everything becomes less and less differentiated until our ego no longer exists as a separate entity. The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into the darkness. Here they become increasingly collective until they are universalized, merging with the body’s instinctual and biological functions; and eventually with nature itself. Hence, at bottom the psyche is simply world.

Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on unnameable transcendental factors, psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. Whatever the external landscape, the internal psychic landscape mirrors it; inhabits it, gives birth to it but also dies into it. The degree to which we are able to perceive the sacredness of what is manifesting around us in nature is the degree to which we are able to believe in the divine aspect of what we commonly know as our own human nature.

Medicine Future

It is a sad truth that despite the medicine’s great potential to steer humanity and the benefits it has granted many people in the past (not to mention its straight-up and barely-believable magic), this art and science is fading fast in its traditional context. Simultaneously we see that it is passing to the West, in a new form of syncretic medicine use that is developing among interested people the world over.

It seems as though as one door starts to close, another opens, and one could reckon that the medicine is moving to where it needs to go, striving to offer people the ultimately satisfying challenge of awakening and becoming a conscious human being.

Despite all this, while the traditional modes of transmission crumble, hope for the future of the medicine tradition comes, ironically, from outside the rainforest; from elements within the very cultures that seem bent on destroying it all. Globally, as more and more people seek reconnection with original nature and their true identity, they are participating in medicine healing ceremonies and/or seeking health through the use of various botanicals from the Amazon rainforest.

The ability of indigenous science and traditional Amazonian medicines to assist people in attaining insight, balance and wellness has been proven on countless occasions. Due to the effectiveness of this medicine, it is inevitable that we will see it gain in popularity, and this will - in ways beyond imagining, as medicine assists people in their personal journeys - help salvage both the medicine traditions and the rainforest environment itself.

In a world governed by corporations and driven by profit margins, even the knowledge of top scientists is not respected, let alone that of feathered masters. Nevertheless there will come a time when indigenous science and modern scientific methods will merge their strengths to help steer humanity back on course. The spirits, deities and immortals revealed through the drinking of medicine want this more than anything else.

Meanwhile this knowledge will continue to help people and communities as it expands beyond the jungle, and I want to believe that nothing can stop it. It is evolution at work, the constructive cycle of the universal energetic flow manifesting itself, gaining momentum and daily getting stronger. More and more sincere Westerners are studying with maestros or joining a type of church that honors this medicine, and more and more books are being written on it.

So despite the loss of much of the original body of knowledge, peripheral forms are being passed along. From these seeds, there can exist a future when the vines again flower, and these arts and ways are respected and able to flourish anew in the rainforest and the world over.

Messengers of Truth

The history of Western culture in the last two thousand years could be seen as the 'Empire of the Mind' conquering the exterior world and extinguishing the interior one, with the result that we have atrophied our spiritual connection. – Rak Razam

The world is deeply out of balance in these pre-apocalyptic times, and a serious correction, long overdue, is underway. The benevolent forces of the earth are reaching out into our culture and touching the consciousness of many people, invoking within them the necessity and the courage to transform and evolve beyond the self-destructive narratives that govern human life today. 

The problems we face run deep, yet the consciousness of human kind seems firmly centered at base level. For many there seems to be little promise that a significant enough transformation can occur in time to avoid ecocide, which is suicide, because along with the industrial revolution we’ve reconfigured our knowledge base to exclude sustainable co-existence with the natural world.

So, then, what is available to us, as creatures of this earth, to remedy these crises? What catalysts, if any, are strong enough to cause the needed infectious tidal wave of personal and communal transformation? One strong enough to cause people to re-think their patterned lives and to restructure them? What in our world can help us to break through the fear of letting go of what we have now, in order to risk discovering what else may be possible?

Enter ancient wisdom. Ayahuasca and Iboga... kindred medicine spirits that are pushing themselves into the collective consciousness of the modern world. Their ancient secrets have been guarded for thousands of years by the indigenous tribes that have since time immemorial structured their cultures and cosmologies around the wisdom gleaned from communing with these plant teachers. Yet for some important reason there is widespread and growing interest in these sacraments as a means to alleviate the cultural malaises that so many in the ‘advanced’ world suffer from.

Used in shamanic and bona fide religious practices, Ayahuasca, native to South America, is a hallucinogenic brew concocted of the ‘vine of the souls,’ banisteriopsis caapi, and other DMT containing plants such as chacruna, or psychotria viridis. Iboga, native to the rainforest of Gabon, Africa, is an entheogenic root bark of the tree, tabernanthe iboga and an ancient sacrament of the Bwiti, a spiritual discipline whose African members number in the millions.

Both of these plant medicines are taken ceremonially as medicinal rites to facilitate physical and psychological healing, to teach virtuous living, to develop spirituality, to strengthen family and communal ties, and to deepen one’s connection to the natural world. They are the center pieces of shamanic traditions that have for ages been full-spectrum healing arts that address the total human needs of individuals and communities alike, while addressing imbalances between humans and nature. They bring a human-being into direct contact with the unseen spirit realms of the earth and the cosmos, allowing one to de-intellectualize the mystical nature of life and consciousness.

Unsurprisingly, both of these shamanic medicines are swiftly working their way into the consciousness of the modern, ‘civilized’ world. Transformation is the key to navigating these insane times, and these medicines strike at the root of global transformation, the individual. It takes tremendous courage to ‘step into the fire’ with these medicines, but for those who do, it feels distinctly like a calling or destiny, and very little like a desire or ambition.

Initiates are called to muster absolute courage and humility, and are returned renewed and cleansed with heightened energy and abundant inspiration. Often gaining clear signals about choosing and navigating life’s paths, initiates receive visionary insight into the value of life and the connection to the natural world. The message is similar for many: Wake up, let go of the past, balance the ego, refine yourself, refine your personal energy; and move your life in the direction of service, with gratitude for each breath that you take.

Fear is understood and overcome, and the infinite nature of human consciousness is revealed. Emotional healing happens instantly, and self-judgements and criticisms are re-apportioned into task lists for personal development. Impulsivity and addiction are understood as destructive forces that require domestication, and the impetus to do so is received abundantly. One reassess their connection to nature and sees, senses and directly feels the sentience in all things, thereby tempering their sense of seniority in the cosmic web of life. A new life path unfolds, deep, enduring questions are answered, and forgiveness is granted. A life purpose lost is re-discovered and the seeker becomes new, refreshed, and reborn into a new perspective that lasts a lifetime.

These plant teachers are one of nature’s greatest tools for communicating with human beings. Iboga is the tree of knowledge. Ayahuasca is the vine of souls. Together they comprise an entirely complete, organic language and are reaching out into the world seeking warriors of truth to translate and seed the message of the Earth, who is unmistakably our Mother. They are calling us, speaking directly to us in spiritual form, asking for our involvement in this life or death struggle to return to equity, respect and balance to our relationship with the natural world.

They are messengers of truth from the earth...are you listening?

Unsustainable Growth

The insanity of the explicit goal, of the Rio+20 Environmental Summit, was evident: sustainable development. That phrase could mean a lot of things in theory; in practice, what it means is, in the words of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Dr. Kerri-Ann Jones, to "maintain economic growth and protect the environment."

In our current system, economic growth means the conversion of nature into product and human relationships into services. It is widely recognized, at least among environmentalists, that Earth cannot sustain much more of the former. Less understood is that the expansion of services bears a limit as well; that we witness today as the atomization of community, the disintegration of civic culture, the enclosure of the cultural commons and the deskilling and helplessness of nearly the entire population. There is little left that we do not already pay for.

Advocates of "sustainable growth" hope to expand the realm of goods and services - that is, increase consumption - without doing all of these things. In other words, they hope we can consume more and less at the same time. That is impossible, when growth means more purchasing power, more production, more automobiles, bigger houses, more electronics, more roads, more air travel... all of these contribute to economic growth as we define it today.

Transferring growth from these areas onto "green" industries is not a long-term way to sustain eternal growth either, although that transition is important in its own right. Certainly, we should get energy from sunlight rather than fossil fuels and nuclear power - but can we increase the number of solar panels forever? Certainly, we should stop clear-cutting, mining; and ranching the Amazon - but can we increase the production of those things forever? Obviously not.

Furthermore, the most effective green technologies involve simply using less: conserving energy, living in smaller houses, biking instead of driving, couch-surfing instead of building new hotels, sharing and borrowing instead of owning a personal copy of every good - and so on. All of these involve economic degrowth. In aspiring toward sustainable growth, then, the Rio+20 participants carried an irreconcilable contradiction with them into the conference. Given the way that growth is defined in our current system, sustainable growth is impossible.

This should not be a perplexing proposition. What being or system in nature grows forever without reaching a steady state? Most animals go through a growth phase (in humans we call it childhood) and then cease growing larger in size. Immature ecosystems likewise: they rapidly gain in biomass for a while before reaching a steady state. In both cases, development continues. The ecosystem grows in complexity and interconnectedness. The human being continues to grow emotionally and psychologically well after adolescence ends. Could the same dynamic apply to humanity as a species?

If so, then it is time for economic growth as we have known it to end. The differences at Rio+20 were irreconcilable, because in the current system - generally speaking - policies that foster economic growth harm the environment; and policies that heal the environment hurt economic growth. There are exceptions to this rule, but the essential contradiction is unavoidable. To address it, change on a very deep level is needed, change to the very nature of the economy, money and capitalism. It is not to end capitalism, but to change the nature of capital.

Humanity is coming of age, and the old growth paradigm is becoming obsolete. Any attempts to maintain it past its time will fail as dismally as Rio failed. If anything good came out of the summit, it was in the smaller-scale side agreements involving individual nations and corporations that in various ways embody a post-growth sensibility. The time has come to interrogate our basic notions of growth, development and economy. 

Like it or not, our relationship to Earth is changing. Indeed, our consciousness has changed already - probably no one at the Summit advocates the continued wanton despoilation of the planet. Our consciousness has shifted from the early-20th century ideal of conquering nature. However, our institutions, whether money or politics, are not yet in accordance with our changed consciousness. That is why it is so important to question the blind ideological assumptions - particularly that of sustainable growth - that underlie those institutions.

Big Blue Valuation

Putting a price on something that is priceless is, well, tricky. It is, however, possible to assign a number to how much damage is being done to that thing. In the case of the oceans, a conservative estimate of the cost of climate change is that by the year 2100 it will amount to nearly $2 trillion annually in 2010 dollars, or about 0.4% of global GDP. Any number that purports to describe an economy nine decades hence must be taken with a dollop of salt, of course. But it should not be dismissed out of hand.

Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth Stanton, economists at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), a non-profit research organisation, arrived at their figure by looking at five measures: how much fisheries and tourism stand to lose and what the economic impact would be of rising sea levels, more storms and less carbon being absorbed by oceans. If the world continues to warm at its present rate and temperatures rise by 4°C by 2100, they reckon, the total will come to $1.98 trillion. If drastic measures are taken to cut emissions and they rise by only 2.2°C, it will be $612 billion.

This does not take into account unexpected catastrophic events. What happens if Greenland’s ice-sheet collapses? What if all the methane stored in the Arctic is released? The researches prefer not to contemplate such scenarios. As a result, their could be viewed as a conservative estimate. The economic argument of the SEI’s new book, “Valuing the Ocean”, is that the world stands to save at least $1 trillion every year by doing something about climate change.

The point of the exercise is, of course, to make policymakers - and the public - take notice. Dr Ackerman would like to see climate change become as much a piece of furniture in people’s heads as is airport security or the risk that their house might catch fire. He has long been a vociferous critic of the cost-benefit analyses used in policy-making. Instead, Dr Ackerman suggests looking at combating climate change as a form of insurance.

The insurance analogy is imperfect though. Insurance is about pooling individual risks; it is by definition impossible to pool a risk that affects the whole world. In that respect fighting global warming more akin to defense spending - stumping up now to fend of an uncertain future threat - which few question as unreasonable even in the most peacable of times. Making the oceans a topic of conversation is difficult; $2 trillion ought to concentrate minds.

No Planet B

In the late afternoon on day two of the international climate change talks in Durban, Christiana Figueres (Head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) made a passionate case for why failure to reach an agreement was not an option: the future of humanity is at stake. She went on to stress that there is no Plan B, just as there is no Planet B.

As the Kyoto protocol on global warming runs out, the COP17 conference to agree a replacement limps towards failure. Sir David Attenborough, of the BBC Planet series, says that city dwellers are out of touch with what is happening in the natural world; and therefore don't take responsibility for the future of the planet. Judging by the response to date, politicians and corporate leaders are urban animals who - apart from the odd tropical vacation - spend their days inside the airconditioned spaces of parliament or head office buildings.

The message is that we may as well carry on belching carbon into the atmosphere because, if we don't, someone else will – an argument that could equally be used to justify selling one's daughter into prostitution. If the representatives of developing countries won't take responsibility, most other political leaders in developed countries won't either. The implicit message is that the job of tackling global warming can be placed on hold while they sort out the economic crisis. That, on more optimistic estimates, will take until about 2017. The planet will then be perilously close, scientists predict, to the tipping point for irreversible climate damage. 

Some say we need a miracle to save the eurozone and the banks. We need a far bigger one to save the planet. According to the World Bank's 2010 world development report, if all coal-fired plants scheduled to be built in the next 25 years come into operation, their lifetime CO2 emissions will equal those of all coal burning since the industrial revolution. Business leaders, particularly in financial services, are now the true rulers of the world. Can they take responsibility? It seems not yet. The world's banks may be running out of cash, but a report just published by environmental groups shows that in 2010 they invested nearly twice as much in coal-fired electricity and coal mining as they did in 2005.

No, if we want the planet to be saved, we must rely on the politicians. But, persuading the public that they should tolerate nearly a decade of austerity, is itself a daunting challenge for leaders; who have assured voters that neoliberalism could deliver uninterrupted growth. Global warming presents an even greater challenge. People have to be persuaded to make sacrifices for the common good. Neoliberalism, however, has left politicians holding the ring between competing demands for individual gratification. 

They run what the US political theorist Philip Bobbitt calls "market states", which have the sole duty of maximising opportunities for their individual citizens, and accept no obligation to social justice or collective welfare. The common good has become, to politicians of both left and right, a completely alien concept. They have no language in which to convey to their electorates the importance and urgency of what needs to be done. They will no doubt emerge from Durban with fine words and some semblance of agreement or, if nothing else, agreement on when they should make an agreement. But for now, the planet will just have to carry on burning.

Climate Vulnerability

The global north is at lower risk of global warming impacts and is better placed to cope, than the global south; but globalization means we are all affected. When the world's nations convene in Durban in November in the latest attempt to inch towards a global deal to tackle climate change; one fundamental principle will, as ever, underlie the negotiations.

It is the contention that while rich, industrialized nations caused climate change through past carbon emissions; it is the developing world that is bearing the brunt. It follows from that, developing nations say, that the rich nations must therefore pay to enable the developing nations to both develop cleanly and adapt to the impacts of global warming.

 
The point is starkly illustrated in a new map of climate vulnerability (above): the rich global north has low vulnerability, the poor global south has high vulnerability. The map (produced by risk analysts Maplecroft) combines measures of the risk of climate change impacts - such as storms, floods, and droughts - with the social and financial ability of both communities and governments to cope.

But it is not until you go all the way down to 103 on the list, out of 193 nations, that you encounter the first major developed nation: Greece. The first 102 nations are all developing ones. Italy is next, at 124, and like Greece ranks relatively highly due to the risk of drought. The UK is at 178 and the country on Earth least vulnerable to climate change, according to Maplecroft, is Iceland.

The vulnerability index has been calculated down to a resolution of 25 square kilometers; and Beldon says at this scale the vulnerability of the developing world's fast growing cities becomes clear: "A lot of big cities have developed in exposed areas such as flood plains, and in developing economies they don't have the capacity to adapt."

Of the world's 20 fastest growing cities, six are classified as 'extreme risk' by Maplecroft; including Calcutta in India, Manila in the Philippines, Jakarta in Indonesia and Dhaka and Chittagong in Bangladesh. Addis Ababa in Ethiopia also features. A further 10 are rated as 'high risk' including Guangdong, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Karachi and Lagos.

China, the world's workshop, sits almost exactly halfway in the vulnerability index at 98 out of 193. That's appropriate, as China now sits awkwardly between the nations getting rich on carbon emissions and those suffering from its effects. And that's the other major contention that will underpin the UN climate talks in Durban.

Transition Town

This blog has railed against the low mileage model of lament and finger pointing many times. During this period of turmoil the human spirit is countering with it's biggest weapons: altruism and optimism. Its the irony of human endeavour, that, we are at our best during adversity. With that in mind, we can look at historical sentiment and 21st century reality for answers.

Toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson realized the American Revolution had failed to provide institutional mechanisms to keep the creative spirit of insurrection alive in the populace. He wanted to institute a township system, giving more self-determination to local communities, or "elementary republics." For Jefferson, the goal of a democratic republic was to make everybody feel "that he is a participator in the government of affairs not merely at an election one day a year but every day." He worried that the representational government devised by the federalists had deprived people of a public space where their freedom could be meaningfully exercised.

Unlikely as it seems, the Jeffersonian model may get its chance in the next few years, due to the converging forces of peak oil and climate change. Richard Heinberg, author of 'Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World', calls the project that confronts us "a species-wide effort toward self-limitation." Such a project requires global coordination and cooperation to reduce resource consumption and energy use, while industrialized countries "forgo further conventional economic growth in favor of a costly transition to alternative energy sources." For Heinberg's 'powerdown' approach to work, the world would quickly decentralize food, energy and industrial production, and return a great amount of decision-making power to local communities.

We are facing a difficult transition that needs to occur at a rapid pace if we don't want to experience dire consequences. According to Robert Hirsch, author of a 2005 US Department of Energy report on peak oil, the problem is "much worse than the worst that we could think of. . . . The risk to our economies and our civilization are enormous, and people don't want to hear that." We use oil to make our food and most of our consumer goods. David Korten notes, "Without oil, much of the capital infrastructure underlying modern life becomes an unusable asset, including the infrastructure of suburbia, the global trading system and the industrial food production, processing and distribution system."

The downsizing of life is going to be a hard sell, but not necessarily an impossible one. Depending on how it is presented to us, we might see reconnecting to land and community as an improvement over our current alienated state. As Rob Hopkins writes in The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience, "It is one thing to campaign against climate change and quite another to paint a compelling and engaging vision of a post-carbon world in such a way as to enthuse others to embark on a journey towards it." Hopkins proposes that cities might be transmuted from "large, bland places with a few 'entertainment' venues, to diverse places with gardens, ponds, artworks, more opportunities for meeting and working with people and generally more to see and do," where people had "less reason to travel to be entertained."

The English 'Transition Town' movement prepares local communities for the changes that are coming. It is a highly successful and well-developed grassroots initiative ongoing in over 60 towns and small cities across the UK. Transition Town groups share information, meet with local government officials and organize courses in basic skills that will be needed again as fuel supplies diminish. They have also experimented with issuing local currencies that help to keep wealth within a community. It may seem a daunting and unenviable challenge to convince people to adopt such a program; one that includes personal and community sacrifice, a downshift into reduced patterns of consumption and the surrendering of some forms of autonomy for the general good. On the other hand, previous generations of people just like you and I have mobilized for wars and performed enormous acts of service and self-sacrifice.

Hopkins, one of the creators of the program, writes, "Rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localizing energy production, rethinking healthcare, rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building, rethinking how we manage waste, all build resilience and offer the potential of an extraordinary renaissance; economic, cultural and spiritual." Almost any community can make use of the Transition Town model, which offers a holistic approach and practical tools for raising social awareness about the crises we face. Ironically, the virtual Internet provides the perfect mechanism for distributing tools and practices for rebuilding local communities around the world, instantly, so they are available as soon as anyone feels inspired to make use of them. Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

The Age of Water

For tens of thousands of years, fire has defined our civilization. It is fire that has allowed us to smelt metals, to purify chemicals, to power cars, trains and airplanes, to pave over the earth and travel to the moon. Without fire there would be no silicon chips, no pharmaceutical drugs, no plastic toys, no guns or bombs, no televisions or computers. Ours is an Age of Fire, an age which is rapidly drawing to a close.


The Age of Fire is an age of separation, during which humans have sought to dominate and control nature. From the very beginning, the circle of the campfire divided the world into two parts: the safe, domestic part, and the wild. Here was the hearth, the center of the circle of domesticity. Here was warmth, keeping the cold world at a distance. Here was safety, keeping predators at bay. Here was light, defining a human realm but making the night beyond all the deeper, all the more alien. Outside the circle of firelight was the other, the wild, the unknown.

The Age of Fire is also an age of domination. The original technologies of fire mostly employed wood, thereby removing it from the normal biological cycle and preempting the natural flow of matter and energy. No longer did it nourish generations of insects, fungi, and soil. Today we burn oil, not wood, but the mentality of burning is the same: the arrogation of stored energy to human purposes of control, accompanied by the degradation of other phases of the cycle in an unsustainable pretense of eternal linear growth.

The unsustainability of our present system derives from its linearity, its assumption of an infinite reservoir of inputs and limitless capacity for waste. Fire is a fitting metaphor for such a system, for it involves a one-way conversion of matter from one form to another, liberating energy-heat and light-in the process. Just as our economy is burning through all forms of stored cultural and natural wealth to liberate energy in the form of money, so also does our industry burn up stored fossil fuels to liberate the energy that powers our technology. Both generate heat for a while, but also increasing amounts of cold, dead, toxic ash and pollution, whether the ash-heap of wasted human lives or the strip-mine pits and toxic waste dumps of industry.

The end of the Age of Fire promises a reversal of the course of separation and domination that fire has fueled. Immersed as we are in the ideology of separation, it is hard to conceive of a mode of technology that does not involve the objectification, domination, and control of nature. Yet such technologies exist, even if we hardly recognize them as such. They are based not on fire but on earth, water, light, sound, and the human body. Rooted in an ancient past, they nonetheless carry the promise of a "new age." Who knows what unconscious wisdom has named it the "Age of Aquarius"?

Water carries metaphorical connotations very different from those of fire. Water denies linearity: cycling endlessly, it is also the agent of nature's cycles, nourishing both growth and decay. Similarly it resists separation: named the "universal solvent," it tends away from purity to partake of its environment. Water is also the nemesis of control. Seeking out the tiniest crack, nothing can hold it in. As waves in the ocean, it destroys any bulwark. Whereas fire burns clean and purifies what it touches, water makes a mess. Hence the key to preserving anything - houses, books, food, clothes, metal - is to keep it dry.

Water, with its cycles and flows, its unruliness and its ubiquity on earth, could be called the essence of nature. Our dependence on water, the fact that we are made mostly of water, denies the primary conceit of civilization; that we are separate from nature or even nature's master. No more nature's master are we, than we are the master of water!

Yet for centuries we have tried to persuade ourselves otherwise. In science our pretense of mastery manifests most fundamentally in the supposition that water is a structureless jumble of identical molecules, a generic medium, any two drops the same. That any two samples of H2O, or graphite, or ethanol, or any other pure chemical are identical is a dogma with enormous ramifications. It implies that the complexity and uniqueness of objects of our senses is an illusion, that they are mere permutations of the same standard building blocks. Such a view naturally corresponds to the objectification of the world, which makes of it a collection of things, masses.

The opposite view sees every piece of the universe as unique. No two drops of water, no two rocks, no two electrons are identical, but each has a unique individuality. This is essentially the view of animism, which assigned to each animate and inanimate object a spirit. To a Stone Age person, the idea that water from any source had a unique character or spirit would have seemed obvious. Modern chemistry denies it and says any apparent differences are merely due to impurities -- the underlying water is the same. Animism say no-to have a spirit is to be unique, irreducibly and intrinsically unique. To have a spirit is to be special.

One consequence is that we cannot escape the effects of our thoughts, words, and actions. Released into the universe, they leave their imprint there, in effect reconfiguring the reality in which we live. In an Age of Water we will understand this principle. In contrast, today's ideology of the technological fix assumes that we can forever avoid the effects of our depredations, like an addict making the pain go away with another drink. But eventually, when the fixes stop working and the costs become unbearable, we will understand that, like water, all things eventually cycle back to their source.

An Age of Water will imitate the water cycle in its economics as well. Fire is the epitome of consumption, as indeed we have experienced in our millennia-long incineration of social and natural capital. Today, though, we are already seeing the precursors to the cyclical economy of the Age of Water. Waste recycling is only a start, as is zero-waste manufacturing, full-cost accounting (eliminating externalities), and non-interest currency systems. Eventually, all will coalesce into what Paul Hawken calls an "industrial ecology", mimicking the ecology of nature in which "waste is food."

Perhaps the most profound transformation of the Age of Water will be in our spirituality; how we relate ourselves to the universe. Above, when speaking of animism, it was said that each water droplet or other object "has a unique spirit," but that is not quite correct. The conception of spirit as something to be "had," and therefore extrinsic to matter, is a metaphor of separation and of fire. What animism actually implies is that each thing is a unique spirit, that matter itself is spiritual, sacred, and special. Spirit can no more be abstracted out from matter than structure can be removed from the water that carries it. The Age of Water, then, is an age in which we treat the earth and everything in it as sacred.

At the same time, water teaches us that the unique spirit of any bit of matter is not discrete and separate from the rest of reality. Like all things including ourselves, water takes on the spiritual qualities of everything that surrounds it; thanks to its ubiquity and receptivity, it is also the medium of this communion of all with all. Unique we are, each one of us, yet no more separate than two drops of water in the ocean.