Sunday, August 4, 2019

What is this devouring machine?

Why have we fed nearly all of our most beautiful lakes, rivers, and streams to a devouring machine, a human-created ‘god’ that has no consciousness, no ethics, no heart? This machine is called capitalism and it was created by humans; something made-up, just a ‘theory’ that was tried out on the whole world, an experiment that has gone very wrong, in which most of us are complicit. 

Many people may think that sacrificing to the gods is something humans did long ago, that giving the best foods, the best craftwork and art to the gods in order to give thanks and ensure a good harvest for all was ‘primitive.’ But we have simply twisted this beautiful practice of gratitude and respect, and instead we now sacrifice our oceans, our mountains, our forests, our freshwater, our air, to our god of capitalism everyday, so that we can have more and more and more, more plastic gadgets and games that break in a week, more garages and storage units filled with broken and unused crap that we never needed at all. And what about human sacrifice? That taboo subject that we are so sure we would never do? We sacrifice humans every day, every minute, to our god of capitalism. This god has an insatiable appetite for the poor and was first created on the backs of slaves and continues to be fed through the gaping maws of mining, dredging for tin and sand, sweatshops, children recycling dry-cell batteries in Bangladesh, mind-numbing and body destroying factory workers the world over… The list of its appetites goes on and on. This is human sacrifice. 

But instead of spending energy blaming, since we are almost all entangled in this gods grip, we can learn from this massive failure and participate in co-creating an economic system that is not a machine, that is not destroying our home, but is embedded in the laws of nature and reflects a deeper truth, that we are all – humans, animals, plants, minerals, the elements – part of the community of the Earth. It is an enormous task to be sure, as the economic system infiltrates almost every aspect of 'civilization' as we know it. But humans created this and humans can create something far better. We can create a living economy, an ecosystem economy that has parameters beyond which it simply can’t go, a system that can respond within the natural laws that do not poison one’s home and one’s body. We can stop feeding the machine that unthinkingly devours and start living in ways that support all life, build community, and feed what is truly valuable – human lives, animal lives, the soil, the water, the air, our capacity for compassion, reciprocity, gratitude, love – all the things that give meaning to our lives and help us to become true human beings. 

A big challenge is that while the creation of this god-machine mainly serves a very small percentage of people with the big winnings, it serves a large swath of the ‘middle classes’ with the crumbs, which are large enough and just satisfying enough to create a kind of complacency or sleepiness that allows people to look away, not think too deeply about things, and keep the machine fed at any cost. 

And when we create something new, are we going to simply find ways to continue this meaningless and insatiable consuming lifestyle but do it with less pollution and less waste? Is that all we really want? Is that the highest embodiment of humanity? Are we really just here on this amazing and awe-filled blue marble hanging in space to buy and sell mostly useless things? Is that it? If not, then we need to watch out, to pay attention, to not just settle for the green washing solutions.  Yes, to be sure, we need to find paints that aren’t toxic, substances that are truly biodegradable, methods that don’t create pollution and aren’t poisonous, and clean up all the messes, but can we also look deeper than this?  We’ve been under the spell of this inhuman machine for so long, we are in danger of forgetting our own humanness, our souls, the soul of the Earth… What are we really hungry for deep inside? Why do people feel so depressed, why all the suicides, the need for numbing drugs and alcohol? What happened to our human values, to the desire to give back, to make a contribution to the world, to be of service, to love and be loved, to care for the Earth, to feel grateful, to experience a deeply meaningful and well-lived life? None of that requires an unbalanced amount of worldly goods or useless stuff, right? So we can each start feeding that inhuman machine less and less. Step away and explore other much more interesting ways of life… To paraphrase Anne-Marie Bonneau @zerowastechef, “We don’t need millions of people doing this perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” 

While I don't feel that science will solve our folly–only a change in our consciousness, our attitudes, beliefs and understanding, can do that–I do think that science will certainly help clean up some of the messes and help us create nontoxic/biodegradable substances. I just watched a truly inspiring documentary called Inventing Tomorrow that follows several young people whose deep love of the Earth leads them to an international science fair competition where they bring their brilliant projects for cleaning up lakes in India, filtering the lead out of tin dredging waste water in Indonesia, and creating a photocatalytic paint that removes pollutants! The hard work and dedication of these young students is truly admirable: https://www.pbs.org/video/inventing-tomorrow-sxzrgx/


Underland by Robert Macfarlane

If you were to read only one book this year, make it this one! A lyrical exploration of the many mysterious activities that are happening or have happened beneath our feet... An interwoven feast of meaning, questions, philosophy, science, and stories. A rare and profound gift of a book.

"In this highly anticipated sequel to his international bestseller The Old Ways, Macfarlane takes us on an extraordinary journey into our relationship with darkness, burial, and what lies beneath the surface of both place and mind. Traveling through “deep time”—the dizzying expanses of geologic time that stretch away from the present—he moves from the birth of the universe to a post-human future, from the prehistoric art of Norwegian sea caves to the blue depths of the Greenland ice cap, from Bronze Age funeral chambers to the catacomb labyrinth below Paris, and from the underground fungal networks through which trees communicate to a deep-sunk “hiding place” where nuclear waste will be stored for 100,000 years to come. “Woven through Macfarlane’s own travels are the unforgettable stories of descents into the underland made across history by explorers, artists, cavers, divers, mourners, dreamers, and murderers, all of whom have been drawn for different reasons to seek what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness within the world.”

Global in its geography and written with great lyricism and power, Underland speaks powerfully to our present moment. Taking a deep-time view of our planet, Macfarlane here asks a vital and unsettling question: “Are we being good ancestors to the future Earth?” Underland marks a new turn in Macfarlane’s long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart. From its remarkable opening pages to its deeply moving conclusion, it is a journey into wonder, loss, fear, and hope. At once ancient and urgent, this is a book that will change the way you see the world."