The Challenge
When I read another article about the importance of electric cars and renewable energy, I feel something is missing. It’s not that I doubt human inventiveness. After all, it is human inventiveness that has brought us to this stage of multiple environmental tipping points. Relatively speaking, the long-evolving earth was once a quiet place, unencumbered by airplanes, cruise ships, and pipelines. People, once they appeared on the scene, were, of course, up to mischief because that is what people do. Still, when I ponder the cars and solar panels, after I ask the honest questions as to where will these cars and panels come from and how much energy does it take to produce them and how long will they last, I am still faced with another honest question, namely, how come so few people talk about conservation and how we live. Where are the conservatives in the true sense of the word, those who wish to conserve the earth as a livable planet for all the creatures on it and who are willing to declare that conserving and the caring that goes with conserving is the chief challenge that faces humankind?
I don’t doubt that such people are out there. You, dear reader, may be one of them. Perhaps you support the Nature Conservancy or the Wilderness Society but the question remains: Are you living with less? The deep challenge is not external and does not lie in making more of anything or buying more of anything. Certainly not if not paired with cutting back, way back, on many things. So much of the earth is burdened already with way too much, as in cars and ships and planes (to say nothing of missiles and bombs). We are quick to say that we like cars and ships and planes and, as part of our reasonable mischief, our ability to declare our wants and conveniences as needs, that tends to be the end of the discussion. After all, we can’t undo what we have invented and used on such a massive scale. We are the sons and daughters of Prometheus whether we like it or not.
Again, what is curious in the discussions of what-we-must-do is how little of what used to be called “soul-searching” occurs. Maybe this is because we don’t feel we have souls to search and that the identity-proclaiming self replaced the soul quite a while ago. Yet our flaws, which are the suppositions that underlie how we live, seem to be staring us in the face. I mean, for instance, our indifference to limits about anything, our eager acceptance of whatever comes down the electronic pike, our willingness to declare organized greed as the highest form of human endeavor, our continued indulgence in scapegoating and tribal enmity, our reality-destroying embrace of exaggeration (of which Donald Trump is a larger-than-life symbol), and our longings for the seemingly endless products of industrialism which we, apparently, cannot get enough of. Somehow we believe that through invention we can avoid all these matters. By manufacturing this and that, we can trust those externals and let the internal dangle in some ill-lit limbo—a realm that, beyond the ministrations of self-help and the preachments of social adjustment, is not worth thinking about. Inconsequential and impractical. Mere vapor.
One of the selling points of the modern world that has brought us to this dangerous place is glamour. Its aura may be diminished in the world of mass products but its effect remains. We yearn for excitement, something special, something novel, something high-class, something that will take us out of our lives. It’s as if once we move beyond necessity, we don’t know what to do with ourselves beyond welcoming the wide floodgate of wanting. “More” seems as good an answer as any to the dilemma of what we are doing here. Indeed, it abolishes the dilemma. More money, more possessions, more travel, more opinions, more channels: they all entice and make a kind of gross sense. We believe material things can meet non-material needs, a belief constantly reinforced in advertisements where it is the principal theme. Feelings of humility and gratitude do not play in such a league. If virtually everything can be bought and sold, there isn’t much left to revere. Any second thoughts are abolished by the notion of perpetual progress and economic “growth.” How we manage to think that a period of time distinguished by world wars, atomic bombs, and numerous genocides is an epoch of betterment testifies to the enchantment bred by technology. Any glowing shred of electronic glamour will cheer us up, or at least sedate us.
We all partake of the modern mindset, possessing as we do what Charles Taylor defined as “the buffered self.” Spirits cannot assail us because we do not believe in spirits. Hamlet, as he tries to reckon with a ghost, beckons to us from another world. We remain, however, creatures who are defined each day by our appetites. We need sustenance. Due to the proliferation of technical means in modern times many of us can take that need for granted. Money will take care of sustenance—and then some. Even amid the hosannas about the free market and the genius of commerce, it’s an understandable equation but one that leaves out our relationship with the earth. Despite this and that catastrophic natural event, we have taken the stability of the earth as a matter of course. The seasons follow one another in a calming order. We plant and harvest. Rain and snow and the earth itself give us water. Oxygen is there for the taking. We are the nephews and nieces of the earth’s abundance which puts a kindly, avuncular hand on all of us. We may even think we deserve such good fortune and, accordingly, have much better things to do than dwell on what enables our lives. Our human egos are at the center of everything, aren’t they?
What sustains any society is culture in the encompassing sense of the word—food, mores, art, athletics, education, crafts, music, practical and spiritual lore, curiosity, caring, the patient investigation represented by science. These dimensions intertwine in more ways than we can hope to count but all are important. We disavow them at our own risk and, to be sure, we live now with an amount of risk that seems on many days insupportable. Unsurprisingly, “more” leads to overreaching, as if, to return to my theme, nothing needs to be conserved and everything is there for the squandering. Freedom means a world without limits. Unfortunately, if we add up the many lives pursuing happiness on the material plane, to say nothing of nation-states with their self-aggrandizing agendas, we arrive at where we are now—a free-for-all whose environmental impact is becoming all too clear.
As it treasures what sustains us, culture is conservative and respectful of past generations. Innovation may beguile us but doesn’t necessarily sustain us—far from it. The deepest ties, those based on love and devotion, are, as human matters, sempiternal. It’s very hard to say “first things first” in a world of so many things, yet we do live in that sensible light—we can only take one bite at a time, live one day at a time, and, even as we board an airplane, take one step at a time. Despite our notions of possessiveness, we can’t lose the earth because we never had it. We can, however, obliterate what sustains us. To do otherwise represents, at this fraught point in time, the challenge. Simple living may appear as little more than a slogan and an insult to those who are consigned by politics, prejudice, and economics, to poverty, but our wants are not our needs. The twenty-three years I lived off the grid taught me to revel in the earth’s ardor but also to prize it. Nature asks for nurture. That’s what Eve and Adam were doing once upon a time. The distractions feel endless but they aren’t. As far as finite beings are concerned, nothing is endless.
Damn, Baron, well put! I couldn't agree with you more. I continue to be dumb-founded by the disconnect of everyday choices being made without regard for impact of these actions. I will share this widely to see if I can jumpstart that conversation in my life again! Thanks for putting clear words to some of my inner confusion about the way life is lived on planet Earth.