all hands on deck NOW!
beware - like any salty seaman, this blog contains more than its fair share of expletives
My homeland, the so-called United States, I know, intimately, how much you/we like to be First. But this is not an area in which we want to be proud to be out front - as the worst emitters, causing the most cumulative damage to the planet.
And it's not like you can say,
“Well I'll lie in my own shit if I want to!”
Because the atmosphere is shared, the winds and ocean are shared, as this image of the global conveyor belt of thermohaline circulation so clearly shows.
Our home planet is one living breathing organism, so when you mess with its breath, the breathing capacity of more than yourself is impacted. For example, Harvard estimates 8-9 million people each year are dying prematurely due to air pollution caused by fossil fuels, which is more than tobacco, guns, and warfare combined (from the TED talk I reference below). This is what is actually going down in the REAL world. The world that we share.
Avoidance is no longer an option.
“Now is better than New and Time is more important than Tech,” says that TED talk. We need to stop our reliance on fossil fuels NOW! Fixing things later is not an option. We're fucked if we wait any longer. (Again, that’s me cursing, as scientists are generally discredited if they show emotion. So I guess it’s down to me today.) We've already wrought huge damage that will take decades to remedy, but it can only be remedied if we stop any further damage now. If we keep going there is, in fact, a point of no return.
It's like an abusive relationship. We're letting our father beat up our mother, even though we're now old enough to see clearly what's happening. And we’re big enough to intervene to save her from being pulped by his fists and knives and belts and blades and myriad other horrors. She is getting so beaten down, so drugged, that she cannot love us anymore.
But we are adults now. We can do the right thing by stepping in and stopping the violence and learning to love our parents, particularly our mother who has made EVERYTHING possible.
No more time for spoiled brats.
Yes, sure, folks like to avoid the whole issue with a nihilistic response like, "The Earth will be fine. We humans might perish, but the Earth will be fine, and even better off without us." That's so NOT the point and avoids all responsibility. That is not ethical bystanding.
That is complicity in the crime.
It's clearly someone in denial, a key stage in the grief process, which we must acknowledge so we can face up to what has died. Because SO much has in-deed died. Not to mention that our dream for our children is dying. Even the possibility of having children, for some of us! One thing that must die, that I aim to actively kill, is our vision of ourselves as some almighty conquerer. Only thing we've conquered is kindness and compassion.
We've killed them with our need to consume.
We're facing into not only the cruelties we've wrought knowingly, but also the unconsciousness and deludedness that got us here. We have all the facts now. We've heard all sides of the story. The judgment is clear. Big business at the expense of the Earth is criminal. Yet we haven't extricated ourselves from the benefits. We judge "them" without seeing how insidiously they've infiltrated and made themselves at home in us. Made themselves INTO our actual home.
Our homes are toxic and continue to cause problems. We need green or solar roofs to get us off the grid so we're not tied into the petrochemical chain. We need the power of hemp again, and cloth bags and farmer's markets to get us out of the plastic habit. Carry your own kit and dispose of the disposables (cups, cutlery, straws, dishes). We need to get the foot off the gas. I mean, this is so obvious folks. What's holding you back? We need to strike from work, strike from school, scream in the streets that industry is stealing our children's lives.
Without biodiversity we're fucked. I struggle so much to not scream in classes. For example, we're learning all these Structured Decision Making skills for Conservation Planning and Management. Would you save the Tasmanian Devil or the Koala or this Eucalyptus species? Do a cost-benefit analysis of each and compare…and not once is anyone (aside from me) saying, wait shouldn’t we be looking at how we're fencing and managing ourselves? We're the problem, as this video says, yet we're looking to interfere in everyone else's business first?! How fucked is that?
Yes, I want to save the critters, so desperately do I want to save the critters. Yet I also see that the best way to save the critters is to quit messing with their world and ways. We're the dis-ease. We hate cockroaches and rats and pigeons because they are little scarab-ed, furry, wing-ed mirrors of our own insidious spread. We're everywhere and into everything and with a righteousness that makes me queasy.
An archeologist classmate in my class, with direct experience with Traditional Custodians here in Oz, said it comes down to a difference between a culture of Rights and a culture of Responsibilities.
Imagine where we'd be now, USA, if we had the Bill of Responsibilities instead of the Bill of Rights?
Or if our rights were our responsibilities?! Woah, imagine that…
“Hear ye, hear ye, you have the right to look after your fellow mammals. You have the right to look after the plant beings that not only feed you and the animals you eat, but that make it possible for you to take your next breath. You have the right to keep your waterways clean and to see them as living entities that make all life possible…”
(Unlike in one class where they’re trying to convince me that water and rocks are abiotic and you know I’m fighting back. I know better. It’s to someone’s advantage to say a thing is non-living, so they can exploit it as a resource.)
Our entitlement is grotesque and shameful.
Although I left NYC in 1999 when the US reputation was still one to be admired and even coveted, I have not minded the downturn in reputation that's taken place this past quarter century. I don’t even mind it when people turn their distaste for the US onto me personally as an ex-pat representative of the whole country. That's what happens when you travel - you come to represent your entire nation in who you are and how people perceive you. So, even though I have to wade through people's negative views of the US projected onto me personally, environmental damage being only one of a number of reasons to judge me/us, I have felt it's been necessary and helpful to take US down a notch.
Our arrogance is not attractive.
Our superiority complex is distasteful and actually dangerous.
It is the very thing that has gotten us into this mess with the planet. By thinking we are above it all - that we are entitled, that we owe nothing of care or consideration to the world but rather it owes all to us - we have created a mess that we can only manage to clean up if we do it NOW!
Part of why I quit teaching yoga full time was because it felt too privileged and too blinkered. Too focused on MY evolution. Of course, of course, your evolution is needed. Yet individual evolution will not even be an option once we tip into ongoing climate crisis. Once there is not enough food (even though now we still waste a criminal amount of edible food), your days on the yoga mat will be numbered.
We’re obsessed with ourselves - our diets, our bodies, our thoughts, our celebrities, our gossip, our little stories. And, sure, I’m right up there with the best of them when it comes to wanting to live a good long life. And that is WHY I’m so vehement right now. The only way any of us can live longer and live well - or even live at all - is if we quit poisoning ourselves right now.
I don't need to go into the details do I? You know it all. And I don't need to spell out all the solutions either. Because YOU need to step up and look around, and ask questions, and read what you can, and talk to who you can, in YOUR community. Have the conversations about how to mitigate climate change now. Ride your bike, take the bus, carpool. Plant gardens and trees, buy less, walk more. That sort of thing. I know it’s overwhelming, so here’s a great source in the US for inspirations on how to have the conversations that need to be had (and a far less-expletive driven blog than mine is today!):
I have a joke about “processing”, which is a new-age/alternative health term that pisses me off a bit, and in it I say,
“Oh, I see, you need to take time to process, to process that experience, to process shit…well you know what? Half the world is just trying to get enough food in a day to HAVE a shit, they ain’t got time to PROCESS shit!”
I get it, we little folk on the ground can only do so much - even though it’s vital we realize that our dollars speak loud and clear - as we are all just trying to get enough food in a day to have a shit, much less process big shit like this.
Beyond how we can shift ourSelves, we need to collectively mutiny the current captains of the ships. They are driving us off the edge of the flat world they think still exists. They behave as though there's an end to it. There's no end to it (as the nihilists bank on), but there is an awful lot more violence, starvation, suffering and keening for humans in times to come, if we continue as we are, as this chart shows...
Wake up world!
“Now is better than New
and Time is more important than Tech.”
It's the speed with which we shift ourselves that matters, not the technology that will save us, as this video illustrates. (And here’s a whole series of ideas.) Quit spending gazillions on new tech or on space toys. Clean up our shit right here on the one planet anywhere in the known universe that will still house us.
Think of that grace and love, that even after we've trashed it, we still have a home here. Imagine that. I’m certainly not that magnanimous. If someone trashed my house, poisoned me and my plants and water, killed my children and critters, I certainly would not be opening my doors to him again. Yet Earth…
Why all animals don't just join trunks and tails and arms and oust us is beyond me. The compassion of creatures is something to make sacred and honour. “Oh”, I think I hear you say, “but they don't know. They're not consciously keeping us on board and allowing us to destroy them and their world.” Aren't they?
Then who is?
Because we sure as hell are not acting as though we're awake and aware to the damage we’re doing. We know we’re doing yet, yet we’re still doing it?!?! WTF?
Not just damage to plants and whole ecosystems and animals and whole species, but desecration. Meaning, THEY'RE NOT COMING BACK! Irrevocable damage. We're murdering things and not holding ourselves accountable. This is ecocide. I'm so grateful someone created the word for it so I don't feel so crazy at the horror of watching it go on all around me for my entire life. Like it's normal.
Like it's normal to poison everything--our own waters, critters, even people for CRYING OUT LOUD.
Watch Dark Waters if you haven't or you don't already live near DuPont. Oh, that's right, you don’t need to live nearby because C-8 is now found in EVERY LIVING CREATURE ON EARTH, thanks to them. Including you. You have microplastics and teflon in your body. We were all sold some nice pans and some "safe" containers and now look where that's gotten us. And they’re still in business?!?!
No wonder the wellbeing community is so focused on holding safe containers - they're not only a scarcity elsewhere, people are dying from them in some places.
We're on clean up crew y'all. Like it or lump it.
Sure, I'm all for the love and evolution.
You know me. That's what I've been on about for-ever.
AND a key yogic ethic is saucha--cleanliness.
And another is aparigraha--non-greediness.
And yet another is asteya--non-stealing.
So quit stealing the health of our world with your greed and your shitty manners. Clean up your act NOW. No one is exempt, though some are more culpable than others and therefore hold more responsibilities. Per capita, the US wins the race in emissions that increase the Greenhouse Gas effect, which means we’re warming certain areas of the globe and experiencing more extreme weather events as a result. Although, another metric shows the US falling behind (in this case a good thing, woop woop!) and coming in 5th as the largest carbon footprint per person of the nations.
Here’s another term for you—eco-justice. How the shit hits the fan is not evenly. But you know this. You’re living it. Wherever you are. This is not something we need to convince anyone of anymore. This is something we need to act on, NOW!
Arrival is perhaps my all-time favorite film. I even ventured into a cinema after the Wellington earthquake, when buildings were still suspect and shaky, to watch it again on the big screen. That’s how much I felt I needed it. It met something in me that I needed to have met, which is the mystery of how we do this. How we grow up and look after our Mother. How we put aside our differences, re-cognize our collectivity, and work together FOR ONCE.
Sure, it’s Hollywood and has other distractions and pyrotechnics and it takes aliens landing before we finally wake up and take a good look around at the brilliant blue and green ball we have the fortune to call home, but it also works the way their heptapod language works—in a loop of simultaneous time, not linear time. So the more times you watch it, the more you’ll see (as this video delineates, but only watch it if you’ve already seen the film as I don’t want to spoil it for you…).
And this is us now too. Some of us are futurists, looking as far ahead as we can, like scouts in scrying and science both. Sending missives to ourselves from the future, like this one I channeled last year from the future year 2100AD.
catcher in the why
So much of our world is distractions, some more pleasurable than others and some far more urgent and difficult to identify as distraction. We watch the news to be good citizens. That’s not me speaking because I cannot watch the news, in any form. For me it’s too much of a distraction, too much of an influence, and too much mind-control. Unless I can do something directly, even if it’s as seemingly small as signing a petition or writing a letter to a politician who seems to have power to change things, soaking in the atrocities will only disable me.
And we need as many alert and able bodied folk as are willing to stand up and say,
Thus far and no farther, when it comes to our mother.
And also those ready and willing to get down to the nitty gritty and clean it up.
All hands on deck.
