“Soil, Soul, Society”
By Monica Perez Nevarez, 6/28/2013
Adapting to climate change requires we re-examine how and why we live. And change starts with us, as individuals.
There are few things human beings need to survive: food and water to feed our bodies; homes and clothing to shelter us from inclement weather. Other needs stem from these primary requirements, including energy, waste management, and sanitation which help with efficiency and health. Growing food, water management, tool-making, woodworking, ceramics, glassblowing, and cloth-making were pillars of ancient economies, aside from war plunder. (House-building was a communal activity at first, not a business). Is there a way back to that kind of simplicity? And should we go back to it if we could?
Society progressed and embraced technologies that facilitated farming (the wheel, the hoe, domesticating farm animals), water delivery (the Roman aqueducts), tool-making (fire, bellows, iron, and bronze), and making cloth (spinning wheel, looms, growing flax, cotton and farming silkworms, creating the 'Silk Road' network). Ten thousand years after learning to farm and live in villages, technology and education took a great leap forward with the invention of Guttenberg's paper press, and three centuries later, the Steam engine redefined the economy, and everything changed. The added knowledge in books and the added energy of the steam engine made more work possible in less time, and empowered individuals to do alone what had up to then only been done communally. And thus began the concentration of wealth for those that leveraged that power.
During the Industrial Revolution, the economy boomed: businessmen began to extract natural resources at breakneck speed, without supervision, regulation, or understanding from the government; industry broke up work processes into discrete actions, creating worker dependence and making the production of goods more efficient and cheaper, but destroyed artisanal masters and their ethos of creating a product from start to finish, and building a product to last. Businesses in the Industrial Revolution went global (tea from India, coffee from Kenya, herbs from the Far East), and offered new 'necessities of life' to society at an affordable cost, and society became hooked on the immediacy and comfort of those new products and services. The business model and mindset of siphoning small amounts of money from as many people as possible created an addiction that has only grown more desperate with time.
Somewhere in the last 100 years, the idea of development was transformed, from an exercise in communal growth to one of individual growth and dehumanizing mechanization; businessmen focused exclusively on getting richer, and their way of thinking spread like a virus. Personal wealth created (read: paid for) the political framework within which our economy is now run, with unjust and tragic consequences.
As those practices grew, an obscene inequality in wealth, education, and opportunity grew with it, as well as rapid and unfair resource depletion; we have been so rapacious we are killing life on Earth, and the cult of the individual and its corresponding myth of ‘free markets’ has corroded unity and continues to dissolve communities, as more people leave rural areas in search of work in larger cities. Most egregiously, society has lost the intimacy every person had with the land and the food they ate, and wealth concentration has created ‘food deserts’ among those that most need nourishing food, ie, the poor.
From the 'Land of Milk and Honey' to the Land of CAFO's and Colony Collapse Disorder
In the last 60 years, the way we do business has consolidated industries and created a society that is dependent on ever-increasing consumption of genetically modified crops and highly processed foods, dangerous extractive practices of natural resources, the use of toxic materials, and petroleum-based synthetic fibers to produce goods, and the consumption of ever-larger amounts of fossil fuels, at a time when environmental priorities demand alternative lifestyles that are completely different than our own. The offshoots of Eisenhower’s 'military-industrial complex' have taken over the economy, politics, and government.
And not only are we dependent on toxic processes for our food and livelihoods, but we have also become a consumer society made up of individuals that no longer know how to be self-sufficient, and our communities are too politically polarized to effectively talk to each other. Add to that the imminent threats of climate change, and you realize humanity is facing the greatest challenge it has ever faced: how to help every living person realize what the real costs of a rich-world lifestyle are, what our collective mistakes have been in our development trajectory, and use the knowledge and technology we have to create a world that allows some comfort and lots of work, health, and happiness for all (including all other living beings). We cannot let a government swayed by business interests decide, we must tell them what we want. To do this, we have to act ethically and wisely as a society, as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as humans. Technology won’t solve our problems, although it might help. At any rate, change must begin at the individual level first.
As Wendell Berry wrote in a recent article “…responsibility for the better economy, the better life belongs to us individually and to our communities. The necessary changes cannot be made on the terms prescribed to us by the industrial economy and the so-called free market. They can be made only on the terms imposed upon us by the nature and the limits of local ecosystems. If we’re serious about these big problems, we’ve got to see that the solutions begin and end with ourselves.”
Are there any role models to learn from? Yes. Aboriginal and Native peoples around the world were perfectly attuned to their environment before the advent of the 'Age of Discovery.' There is much to learn from them. Thousands of books have been written on ecology, environment, economy, and climate change since the ’60s; they are a good resource. We can also look to our recent ancestors, who, although the Industrial Revolution had well engulfed them, still lived close to the land and in tune with it. We need to learn how to live and consume the way our grandparents and great-grandparents did, and study how we can adapt our lives to their level of energy consumption, community participation, entrepreneurship, and personal resilience. We need to become interdependent again (not dependent as children are, nor independent self-seekers, but interdependent adults), in order not to depend on corporations for our food, our well-being, or our jobs. We can marry lessons from the past with current knowledge and low-tech and mechanical tools and transition into a sustainable future.
Are there any current examples to follow? Cuba, Transition Towns, and rebirth in crumbling urban centers.
In places where people have little choice, alternatives sprout up: on the economic sidelines, we see a robust trend towards becoming self-sustaining. Cuba, long under Soviet dependence and a crippling US embargo, turned to urban gardening after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which twenty-four years later has evolved into relaxed business laws that allow ‘Home Restaurants’ and other capitalist offshoots to grow, and a nascent entrepreneurial society, to establish itself, which would have been unheard of under Communism. In Britain, groups of neighbors got together to “re-localize” their economies and grow their food and the idea stuck; they are now known as “Transition Towns” and the concept is spreading around the globe.
Out of the bleak remains of inner-city Detroit, people bought foreclosed properties and county administrators tore down derelict buildings, and a city map that was densely populated with small homes on stamp-sized lots now looks like a patchwork quilt of urban gardens; a garden city is emerging that is self-sufficient in fresh vegetables and urban chickens. In Milwaukee, one man turned a 1,000 square foot derelict greenhouse into a business that produces over one million pounds of produce a year. Here in New York City, groups in Brooklyn have created solutions with rooftop farming (The Brooklyn Grange http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/), and urban gardening in a Food Desert (East New York Farms! http://eastnewyorkfarms.org/) that offer local produce where once there were only food deserts.
Where do we go from here?
Start with the things an individual can do. Be energy efficient (offset your travel and driving by walking using mass transit, buying carbon credits;re change lightbulbs to LED's, use solar energy, buy solar and wind-powered electricity, drive electric, eat locally sourced foods, build using Passiv Haus or LEED standards, reduce waste, recycle, consume less, for example). Re-localizing the economy and growing healthy food counteracts wealth concentration, spreads wealth and wisdom locally, and creates community bonds, which engender resilience. And it starts with one person doing business (filling a need) with another person (seeking a good or service) in their community, producing your own goods, or growing a food garden, or engaging with young people in educational experiences. Figure out what works for you while designing a business that solves a larger problem.
Make use of all the science and education that already exists to set personal and communal metrics, benchmarks, and goals, so you keep track of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Once you have created a community, spread that friendship and that community-building message to neighboring areas, and expand your network outward, organically.
Make special efforts to love, be generous, and teach the next generation about the Earth, the community, and their role within the web of life, so we no longer grow men and women that think humans can control everything through wealth, power, or technology, or that some humans are better than others, or that our species is more important than other species that share the planet with us. We are all equally a part of the Web of Life, and we share the right to clean air, clean water, healthy habitat with all living thongs.
Use all forms of available communication media to get your message out. Face to face is a good starting point, but engagement requires constant tending, and social media is global, immediate, and can be compelling. Educational disparity fuels inequality, so use every tool at your disposal to abolish that inequality and disseminate more knowledge to every person in your community.
Most importantly, lobby your legislators, educate them, join groups that are fighting for what you believe and need; be active politically. Be a part of a robust community, where people care for each other and look out for one another. Decide what you want your world to look like, how we should act in it so all of us are included and respected, and be vocal about how you see reality, including climate change, economic collapse, social inequality. Be open to new perspectives, but check the facts. When you encounter others that place more value on money than on humanity, find the things you have in common, and work up from there to where you have a rapport you can work with. Be aware of how legislators are writing laws, and who those laws benefit and protect, and who they harm. Repudiate liars and cheats.
What of Businesses?
Non-Profit entities that survived the Great Recession of 2008 have realized that their old business model is not sustainable in this new economy. They must now actively supplement their fundraising activities by offering needed services for pay and seeking partnerships with for-profit businesses and government agencies to build sustainable income flows. For-profit businesses are finding that arrangement satisfying and profitable.
Partnerships between the private sector (business), public sector (government agencies), academia (schools, colleges, and universities), and the third sector (non-profits) are flourishing even as the business sector institutionalizes business models that embed these partnerships (B Corps http://www.bcorp.org/) and Impact Investing networks flourish in a new economic landscape (Ceres http://www.ceres.org/, Net Impact http://netimpact.org/, The Climate Group http://www.theclimategroup.org/), and circular economics makes viable alternatives to traditional financing. The trends are there, make use of them. More alliances like these are needed. In fact, creating partnerships that specifically build sustainable businesses and take into consideration the Triple Bottom Line is the best way to transition away from the toxic economy.
The Challenge
The Earth’s Atmosphere reached 400 ppm of Carbon Dioxide in May 2013 (a limit that scientists agree delineates the number of greenhouse gasses that will cause catastrophic climate disruptions that we will not be able to stop or control), and on a blisteringly hot day in June, President Obama stood up in Georgetown, and for 50 minutes set out his plan to curb climate change.
[As an aside, nary a network television channel (ABC, CBS, NBC) carried the speech, and of the two cable channels that carried it, both CNN and Fox News cut away from the President after ten minutes to discuss the plan with talking heads or climate deniers, respectively. C-SPAN and the Weather Channel carried the speech in full, and social media was (forgive the pun) all a-twitter about it in 140 character bundles. The broadcast media's underwhelming response to the President of the United States’ speech on climate change is very telling, and one of the reasons neither individuals nor businesses have understood or cared about, the urgency of the challenge. This too must change.]
President Obama ended by exhorting us, the American people, to “Act on Climate.” So the challenge has been voiced, and now it’s our turn, as cognizant individuals, to step up. We must do as Wendell Berry says, and go back to the soil, find our souls, and build a better society. Fortunately, we already have a wealth of resources from previous generations that lived close to the land, and within planetary limits; their lifestyles are a lot better for the planet and for society than ours; we must go back to the kind of lifestyle our grandparents embodied, one that respects where and why we live.
Comments welcome, email me at guayabapr (at) gmail (dot) com.
