It has been 8 years since I began this blog. It was meant to be a protracted deep dive into ideas I had about Sustainable Living first promulgated in my 2012 textbook. Some 630 thousand published blog words later I sometimes wonder if I have made any difference to anyone’s thinking. I also guest write blogs for other sites about the same topic, tailored more of course to the audience. In one Environmental Education (EE) blog site I recently praised the work done by EE worldwide. Seriously. I think you can go anywhere in the world and meet people who are aware of the global socio-political-economic-ecological issues. Admittedly, knowledge will range from general awareness to deep ecological understanding, but the word is successfully out about what we need to do.
So why aren’t we all doing it? As I wrote in that EE blog, “What stops us cold is persisting in the belief that somehow the powers-that-be, which control the current global systems, will change it all for us. I conclude that they will not, or cannot, adapt to the necessary socio-cultural changes needed to build a world that lives sustainably. The current set of beliefs and values inherent within a worldview of hedonistic-materialism is completely incompatible with a worldview required for a sustainable future.
I look at the trends occurring worldwide and conclude that communal living will be in our future. How that pans out depends on us now. If the Klaus Schwab’s of the world get their way we will be in a dystopian communalism (think Hunger Games). If we make the choices, it will be a sustainable world. This individualistic market economy consumerism is already failing and I see no signs of it rallying to create a sustainable future.
An old phrase states, Calm Waters never produced skilled sailors. We had lots of chances over the past 80 years to make the transition to a sustainable future, but metaphorically speaking, we are now about to be blown by blown by the ‘Winds of Change’ into a storm of social change. But don’t fear it. Adversity is a crucial teacher for this transition and will give us experiences and insights for a new way of living that we could never have gained any other way. I believe that on these rough waters of change we will find deep inside of each of us the connection to life and each other that we must have to weather this transformation – that spiritual connection I have often talked about.
A futurist I often listen to is Gregg Braden; he has an interesting definition of spirituality: “It is about our relationship to ourselves, our relationship to other people, our relationship to the Earth, our relationship to the past, to the future, our relationship to God [or whatever moral imperative defines you]. All of these come into play when we are faced, as individuals, as families, as communities, as societies, and as a planet, with tremendous amounts of change. It pushes us to the very edge of who we believe we are. And we have to reach deep inside and discover what it is that’s true for us, and what’s real for us. It forces us to identify the values that we cherish, so that we can allow these values to serve us and support us. Spirituality is deeply linked to human resilience.”
Why do I insist that we need a spiritual focus to ‘save’ the world and ourselves? Consider the world we now think as normal. For instance, the global political and economic machine we see in the Industrial Revolution was built on a simple, hard logical worldview. It believed that land and resources had no value unless they were being used. Don’t get me wrong, we need resources and to use the land, but it’s the mindset behind that utilization that is crucial. The Industrial Revolution was predicated on unemotional utilitarianism. From a biography of US President Theordore Roosvelt (1901-1909): “To the Utilitarians, a tree standing in a forest paid no taxes. A river flowing freely turned no mill wheels. To the men in the state capital and the lumber offices, leaving a forest untouched was a waste of money. They argued that resources were meant to build cities and fuel the economy. They believed that nature was a warehouse, not a temple. US President Roosevelt in 1903, did a 3-day back-country excursion into the then really wild Yosemite National Park with Preservationist John Muir. Afterwards he had some comments for the utilitarians. Roosvelt stood before a crowd in the Yosemite Valley. He did not talk about lumber yields or mining rights. He looked at the men who wanted to carve up the park. He told them that we are not building this country for a day, but for the ages. He spoke of the moral duty to protect the land for children who were not yet born.” He was talking about a philosophy espoused by the Indigenous peoples of the Seventh Generation – How do our decisions now influence a population seven generation from now.
Obviously the ‘Robber Baron’ industrialists of the 1800s didn’t care about any generation down the line so long as immediate profits were made. They may have even believed that the immediate ecological consequences of the day were acceptable if standards of living were eventually raised. But they obviously didn’t envision how rampant technology used without wisdom would run amok to ruin the relatively unspoiled natural world of that time.
I re-read about a psychological study recently that exemplifies the utilitarian worldview. It was about one fundamental difference between people who return a shopping cart to a rack versus those that don’t. While more complex than a simple reason – people have lots of reasons not to return a cart – in a nutshell, people who return the carts feel a moral duty to care more about the community than people who don’t (Individualism versus social benefit??). While social norms are important clues of how we live together, I also embrace personal sovereignty. This is one of those tough lessons we will have to rediscover about how we once lived together with social norms dictating behavior, versus living socially with personal sovereignty and creativity used for both personal and social good. Indigenous teaching would be of help here. I have no desire to return to the highly-rigid and really restrictive social norms of a period such as the Victorian era. And ultra self-righteous neighbors are vexatious.
Humanity is in the transition. Everyone on the planet will have to choose their future – there is no status quo anymore, no tweaking positive outcomes – we are way beyond that, no matter how it seems at the moment. The choice is simple – do nothing and get what the Cabal gives you, or choose a sustainable future. We tried a Patriarchal world of hate, greed, corruption and violence for several millennia – I don’t think it worked well at all. So let’s try a return to Androgynous Love. Not the sloppy romantic love – no matter how good that feels when you are ‘in-love’, but a Love of Self; a Love of other (you don’t have to like them, but you can Love them – just like relatives) and love of Life and all the Natural world that feels a lot like being in-love. Imagine that. Now that’s a choice worth making.
It is not a time to get angry or seek revenge against the Cabal. We have to wake-up and take responsibility for our individual actions and stop blaming the big players. Yes, they might be the reason for the scale of problems around the planet, but we let it happen no matter how many reasons we had for being coopted. You cannot save the world by yourself, but you can save and heal yourself for self-Love, and in doing so create a ripple that spreads to others. They in turn ripple Love outwards and before you know it, you have a tidal wave of positive change happening from the grassroots that overwhelms the once titanic forces that controlled humanity for so long. It’s the seemingly little things we do that give us Love and Hope for a Sustainable Future – Hope with its sleeves rolled up. We are living with a proverbial societal cancer – let’s cure it by our Actions and Hope. What little things can you do now to make that choice for yourself? To Be Continued …….
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.” – Mahatma Gandhi
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