Category: Ecology

Wilderness

America is a land originally occupied by casualties, fugitives, dissidents, pirates and radical escapees of the European monarchical and religious order. And ever since, what’s been largely, either inadvertently or deliberately overlooked for three, maybe four hundred years is that the western definition of wilderness was always the property of the invader, the settler, the colonizer.

Wilderness conjures images of foreboding, of desolation, a mythic utopian vision of the undisturbed, uncharted pristine state, a territory beyond imagination, beyond human centrality, unspoiled by human presence and the inevitable resulting abuse until it’s eventually overrun by ‘progress’ and becomes defined-and defiled-by that presence. Only then do we adjust our yearnings, mourn its loss and start looking for another wilderness to relieve us of our angst…or guilt…or to satisfy our insatiable quest for new worlds to tame.

What we imagine there is to gain out of that process is a sense of ownership, perhaps even control. And even though any remaining actual wilderness is long gone, we operate as if there will ever be more, as if our personal inner desolation or pristine nature, our loss of home, is always renewable, can always be recovered, that our sins can always be absolved. Our investment and belief in wilderness, like our belief in imagination itself, is total.

It’s been a universal human trait since the beginning of time to explore the wild, to move outward beyond boundaries, to redefine one’s place, to satisfy a primal urge to seek sustenance in the unknown, to venture onto our own unconscious, to assert personal independence and a renewed sense of belonging to the world. These are the primary extractions. We might include a timeless motivation to escape being relentlessly subsumed into the homogeneity of culture and to reconnect with the heterogeneity of the wild. We explore to know ourselves in re-enacting the imagery of relationship with the unknown and the more-than-human.

What is commonly found in wilderness, or what could now more accurately be called protected lands, in the exploratory process, may enrich our lives, at least temporarily. We may be driven by the dulling of our senses in the urban landscape or an ever-present but barely acknowledged solastalgia, the suffering and grief of being uprooted, homeless. Yet long before there was any such thing as protected land, exploring wilderness, at least in America, also became synonymous with progress. And that progress has brought a world in which every form of wilderness continues to be transformed in ever more sophisticated ways. Ironically, imagining one can escape that commodification (even for just a short time) somehow inevitably leads to its increase.

When the human population was much smaller than its current size, before the carrying capacity of the earth had been exceeded, that wilderness in its iconic state did still truly exist, calling upon the human longing for….what?…a challenge, to continue the indomitable impulse to improve our future, for wholeness? The fulfillment of a narcissistic urge for notoriety, fame, adulation? A purely economic interest? Or just peace and quiet? The relentless commodification of every possible resource, now including attention itself, has always been a dominant motivation. And let’s not overlook the myth of returning to our origin, the original Garden. There’s weight to all of these scenarios.

America is a land originally occupied by casualties, fugitives, dissidents, pirates and radical escapees of the European monarchical and religious order. And ever since, what’s been largely, either inadvertently or deliberately overlooked for three to four hundred years is that the western definition of wilderness was always the property of the invader, the settler, the colonizer. The exploratory enterprise into the vast territories of the Americas was also an enactment of Divine Right, spurred by the Papal Bulls of the 15th and 16th centuries declaring indigenous people to be less than human, fueling the promise of riches with ecclesiastical benediction. If that empire required the eradication of indigenous populations, either by intent or by accident, it never occurred to the occupying force that the territories in question were not wilderness at all to those who lived there, but sovereign territory, the nature and dimensions of which the settlers could not even imagine.

Sustaining the American mythology of wilderness is a solution to something. It gives buoyancy to possibility. Yet modern American culture has never quite satisfied a longing for place, and that wanderlust is both a response to existential homelessness, a sense of not truly belonging to the land, and a temporary escape into actual homelessness that wilderness represents. That escape is ironically motivated by pre-cognitive yearnings for a sense of relatedness to the natural world which we experience at a somatic level, but which has been entirely coopted and twisted by modernity into a reaffirmation of the individualist ethos of America. We may be able to superimpose ‘home’ on what was once wilderness, but what we now call home does not in itself constitute indigeneity. In many respects, home is now a wasteland of the banal, the superficial, in which multinational corporations own the mythology and harvest revenue from it by exploiting our psychic attachment to the idea of wilderness combined with the myth of individualism. The Anthropocene at work.

Your homelessness leads you by the nose to the next solution. So, nobody should be shocked that every solution we come up with deepens the problem the solution was designed to solve.—

—-Stephen Jenkinson

Regardless of where the urge to occupy wilderness originated, at some point it morphed into something much more than any original or merely personal reason to go beyond the horizon just to see what’s there. In the face of accumulating encounters with other cultures already embedded in what we (western explorers and American settlers) persisted in calling wilderness, the enterprise became something very different from the original vision.

In what has since become a central tenet of the mobile tableau of modernity, the vision of exploring the unknown is equated with the drive for perpetual growth, a messianic mission promoted with religious fervor to ‘improve’ life for ‘everyone’ while looking away from the true costs. Recruiting enthusiastic compliance with the program has not been entirely successful. Having a dwindling supply of authentic earthly new worlds to conquer, human imagination is captivated with doing more than gazing at the heavens, but actually exploring space–which of course continues largely without human participation, but occasionally goosed by the chest-beating of the uber-wealthy. The mullahs of physics and biology reach into the mysterious territories of sub-molecular function, even into the vast spaciousness of individual atoms where matter and energy are barely distinguishable. The nature of the human mind continues to inspire and baffle.

Preserving the fantasy of European ‘discovery’ has been a key North American enterprise ever since the origins of its nation-states. Erasure of the indigenous equates the encroachment of wilderness with the creation of home and the ethics of growth, as if history only began with the colonial project. And now, as an alternate narrative of what America exactly was before colonial occupation gains firmer footing and takes hold in popular consciousness, powerful backlash comes from those still asserting that America was a natural and cultural wilderness before white men set foot on its shores. For them, anything pre-dating coloniality does not matter nor did it even exist. Imagine the dissociation necessary to deny all of that violence. Colonial America may have been an escape from empire, but it immediately seeded the creation of a new empire, an ongoing occupation of what is still regarded as wilderness in virtually every elementary school in America.

The nomadic vanguard (a term coined by Patrick Turner in this essay in New Critique), is a property of American coloniality essential to America’s creation story. We were born from a nomadic vanguard and America would not be America without one today. The fact that there are no physical wildernesses left doesn’t deter us from endowing the entrepreneurial spirit with the same ethos of coloniality that occupied and exhausted every inch of territory from sea to shining sea, and which now seeks to invade and claim every inch of ‘market’ space as well, either by data management, surveillance or AI.

In that sense, the new explorers are the old explorers reinvented with more sophisticated tools, sales tactics, marketing and lobbying power to stake out economic territory and collect every possible advantage provided by the corporate state. They may even be enacting admirable features of the American Story, but like it or not, they are still extending and deepening the reach of empire, a story of extraction, exploitation and repression which has not changed in any substantial way.

We are confused about wilderness and fighting over what requires preservation and how to do that. We cannot continue to promote a pioneer ethic without recognizing its true consequences and the empty nobility attached to it. The nomadic vanguard of today is attacking the remaining shreds of what should properly be recognized as real wilderness, not the coopted mythical wilderness of yore.

Chimerica

In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself.

The chimera is a mythical creature depicted in dozens of ancient cultures. It typically is a combination of characteristics of multiple animals, like a scorpion’s tail with a porcupine’s dangerous quills–and maybe bat wings. It could be part eagle, part leopard or a multi-headed beast as described in the Book of Revelations. It might be combination lion and goat or a fire-breathing dragon with a snake’s head at the end of its tail. It might even have tentacles like an octopus. The mythological horse, Pegasus, one of the most widely known mythic creatures, ridden by Bellerephon, battled and defeated a chimera. The Buddhist garuda is a chimera.

The point is, they are all fantastic, dazzling, imaginative and implausible. And scary. They are monsters, wild, contradictory in their visual character and confounding in their implications. Are they wise or dangerous? What is the message they bring with their presence? Do they bring any comfort? Is their sole purpose to comfort the afflicted or–you know, like journalists doing their jobs, afflict the comfortable? Is there any shred of benevolence in them or is their only function to shock and confuse us, to remind us of the depth, complexity and the power of the unseen, the omnipresent and occasionally explosive contradictions humans carry: our capacity for strength, perseverance and nobility, courage and righteousness contrasted with bursts of violence in all its many forms, always carrying a subliminal threat of a poisonous sting, or our capacity for monstrous hypocrisy and fraud?

Since America is turning so many different faces to the world simultaneously, reflecting the conflicts raging within, exhibiting the sharp divisions, the social and economic decline, the descent into warring spasms of rhetorical gas, rising brinksmanship, burning its way through saplings of truth on the forest floor, scorching its way through the previously armored but suddenly vulnerable old-growth giants of science and evidence-based reality, snapping the stinging tail of backlash, transforming social discourse into a cacophony of Babel, America is now a chimera. In America, the chimera is no longer a quiescent aberration, a deep and nagging sense of unfulfilled ideals weighing down every initiative attempting to bring those ideals closer to reality. America has become the chimera to its people, to other nations, to the planet itself. Which of its animistic tendencies and talents will manifest next? Which will dominate and determine not only our own future but the future of the wider world?

Attempting to reconcile its most aggressive and nurturing energies, America’s foundation of democratic ideals, its aspirations toward egalitarianism, its shining successes with its belligerence, hubris, rhetorical duplicity, its blistering and bloody failures, the contrast between forging a new role for governance on behalf of all people versus a zero-sum economic regime tilted entirely toward wealth at the expense of all else, the radical divide has never been deeper or louder or more obvious. The multi-headed beast is tearing itself apart as it is beset with challenges as never before, at moments showing exemplary generosity, at others breathing fire at friends, foes and its own people, struggling to sustain a facade of competence, solvency, invincibility, economic dominance, unity and political relevance.

The term Chimerica was originally coined (unwittingly?) to refer to the mutual economic dependence between China and America in matters of trade and global finance. It was not intended to refer to a monster whose diverse capacities would keep us guessing which of its demonic energies might next be unleashed. While China’s dependence on America may be declining, bringing the Chimerican condition to a close, we’re witnessing an American transformation into a chimeric version of itself which is an increasing threat to the safety of all. Deliberately prolonging the pandemic, guns and gun violence, economic disparity, racism, a barely functioning justice system (whose legitimacy is falling like sand through our fingers), the surveillance state, remote control warfare, and above all, climate misinformation, disinformation and denial—these are the multivariant threats Chimerica has become.

With regard to China itself, the economic, political, territorial and ideological divergence is deepening. The sabres barely remain in their scabbards. I’m not an apologist for China. The regimentation, uniformity and compliance required of Chinese citizens is becoming increasingly intrusive and pervasive. The limits on individuality and free expression are closing in. What China has done to the Uyghurs is a testament that there are no limits to their willingness to destroy divergence.

The strategy, depth and manner of Chinese economic hegemony throughout Asia and in the developing world, their relentless pursuit of their own self-interest regardless of any principle other than to extend and deepen that influence are unprecedented. And at home, for generations now, the Party has instilled an intense nationalism and pride throughout the nation. Picture the way Americans were acting throughout the world not long after WWII, feeling our oats in obnoxious and overbearing displays throughout the world. That’s China now, only more intense, with a more enlightened and strategic vision, careful, but determined to overcome any obstruction.

What I have never heard admitted by any American pundit or historian is a name for what’s happening here. It’s not mere opposition to America per se. It’s de-westernization, a de-linking from the western idea of modernity, from western economic influence, from western finance determining the rules of the game, from western ideas of self-determination (its own form of economic hegemony). While the United States has 700 military bases throughout the world, China has diplomats, technicians, engineers, development banks, consultants and political strategists blanketing Asia, South America & Africa.

China is embedding itself in 1000 different places, building massive infrastructure projects, cleverly currying favor and dependence, and conveying the message that the time of Western determination of the rules is over. Modernity in the image of the West is over. Not that that in itself is a good thing. It’s colonization in a different form. It’s still the Perpetual Growth Imperative, just not defined by Wall Street. Economic hegemony is undergoing a shift from West to East. China is so far ahead of the United States in this regard, it’s making the United States look like its feet are embedded in cement.

The original meaning of Chimerica may be on its death bed. I’m not really suggesting that economic negotiation and mutual dependency are already a thing of the past. But de-coupling is surely underway. De-westernization is taking hold in the world, promoted and financed by China, and among the biggest factors turning America into a multi-headed, multi-species, unpredictable, fire breathing dragon of its own, and getting backed into an economic corner. With all its might, the United States is no longer Pegasus. It’s much more likely to be using Pegasus to spy on you. The hollowness of “We’re number One,” is only going to become increasingly obvious. What happens when something that dangerous feels threatened?

The options are narrowing. There will come a time when China, determining the time, the place and the way it will assert itself, will take steps the US government will regard as aggressive. The United States will be tested. It will talk about safety. It will say the ‘American Way of Life’ is not negotiable or that ‘commitments’ to our ‘friends’ are not negotiable. But in Chimerica, the difference between war and peace is already blurring as industrial espionage, cyber warfare, disinformation campaigns and self serving social media become more intense, amoral and the stakes continue to rise. So also the distinction between safe and unsafe will get so muddy as to become indefinable. The chimera is America’s shadow. Because we are ignoring the world, forgotten our ideals and not lived up to our promise, China is going to bring out the beast in us.

State of Excess: II

The extremes to which which Qatar must go to create or procure the basic requirements of life combined with the rising risks of the entire Q22 effort are reminiscent of an off-world simulation, the illusion of abundance surrounded by an unforgiving landscape.

The Beautiful Game

The original plan forthe 2022 World Cup (Q22) called for nine new stadia in addition to three existing stadia. Since the approval of the plan in 2010, the building agenda has been scaled down to seven new stadia of varying capacities. A new metro system with a total length of 320 km will be completed in 2021. The entire effort will be a showcase for Qatari architectural design, engineering, urban planning, sustainability, transportation systems and fiscal management.

The design of the stadia will reflect aspects of Qatari and Islamic history and tradition such as a retractable roof in the shape of a tent, another reminiscent of traditional dhows used by Qatari fishermen as well as a design in the shape of traditional (male) Qatari headwear. There will also be geometric intricacies integrated into the designs echoing traditional art from across the Islamic world. Most of the new stadia will be repurposed after the Cup, turned into educational, sporting, healthcare and commercial uses with some components donated to sporting programs across the world.

All stadia will provide optimal conditions for players, match officials, spectators and media as they are equipped with retractable roofs and ultramodern (and in some cases solar-powered) refrigeration technology permitting year-round use. Each stadium will be a cocoon of comfort, preventing hot desert winds from penetrating while maintaining temperatures of 20-23ºC on the playing pitch while outside temperatures average 37ºC.

The dark side of accomplishing this massive task is that construction companies in Qatar hired manpower recruiters in numerous counties, Nepal among them, to dangle the benefits of working in Qatar. In a multi-year frenzy of semi-legal activity, these agencies charged recruits for costs, health checks, work permits, visas and airfare, in extreme cases totaling as much as $9000 each, an enormous sum for workers from one of the poorest countries on earth. The Qatari government was actively involved in this effort as well. A Nepali government investigation revealed direct (illegal) links between Qatari diplomats and the recruiting agencies. When the workers arrived in Qatar, they were already indebted to their employers who then paid only one-third of what they promised or in some cases withheld payment entirely for extended periods.

As of May 2017, over 400,000 Nepali migrant workers, half originating from a single indigenous group, had entered Qatar. They’ve had the lowest per capita income of anyone in Qatar. The $4B in remittances sent back to Nepal each year equal 20% of the entire Nepali national GDP, roughly equivalent to sixty minutes of economic activity in the USA. As the infrastructure build-out for Q22 is completed, further employment opportunities will dry up. This will have a significant impact on the Nepali economy, especially since Qatar and other Gulf states are seeking to diversify their labor base and raise the skill level beyond the primary sources of labor they’ve employed for the past decade.

Working 10-14 hours per day in extreme conditions without proper rest, sanitation facilities and living in sub-standard housing (often without wages), workers sustained an estimated 6500 deaths (from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh) over a decade’s time, compared to a combined death toll of less than 30 construction labourers involved in the two previous World Cups. True, many of these deaths may not have been directly related to construction work. Nevertheless, that’s five workers from these countries dying every week since 2010 when Qatar was selected for the World Cup. Qatar barely investigated many of these deaths, classifying them as due to ‘natural causes.’

Even after the disastrous 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Qatar refused to allow workers to return to attend funerals or to care for their families. For years this modern-day slavery and indentured servitude went unchecked. In Qatar and the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council states, until 2018, according to the kafala (sponsorship) system, all of this was essentially legal. Domestic help is treated the same way, and not only in Qatar.

Despite rising global criticism, as recently as 2019, a German broadcaster revealed video evidence that few of these practices had changed. Qatar started reimbursing recruitment fees to some workers in 2018 and enlisted over 200 contractors to comply. But determining the actual fees paid and to whom they were paid was a complication guaranteeing the number of workers reimbursed fell far short of the total deserving them. Some of the restrictions on worker movement were eased in 2020. Wages were increased 30% and employers were enjoined from retaining worker passports. Kafala was being dismantled. But as recently as March 2021, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund declared they would be investigating questionable labour practices across Asia, including Qatar and those specifically related to Q22.

Meanwhile, in the boardrooms, university departments and government institutions, Qataris crow about staging a carbon-neutral world-class event. Carbon-neutrality, however, does not magically appear in a carbon-neutral way. The financing, sourcing and procurement of materials, however sustainably produced, is entirely dependent on revenues from extraction: the sale of offshore gas and the labour extracted to build the venues, the metro system, the parks, the new airport, the hotels and all the other amenities and accommodations of the event.

There are multiple initiatives such as ‘Green Hospitality,’ investments in appropriate carbon offsets and ‘sustainable operation practices’ to support the ultimate carbon-neutrality of the World Cup. But it all depends on visitors using the metro, recycling all waste and using recyclable plastic water bottles, marking a turning point in the standards of the local tourism industry. Qatar is leveraging the World Cup to push the hotels to elevate their game. Fair enough. In this respect, Qatar is indeed implementing progressive climate initiatives, but only at great cost to human and natural capital.

Qatar As Off-World

The extremes to which this nation must go to create or procure the basic requirements of life combined with the rising multiform risks associated with the Q22 effort are reminiscent of an off-world simulation, an artificial biosphere, the illusion of abundance surrounded by an unforgiving landscape, barely sustainable except by extreme measures. Surely there are few places where the interdependence between humans and the natural world is more clouded. Qatar defines the combined rituals of extraction and separation, the mechanics of it, the exploitive nature of it, the psycho-spiritual harm, the mass psychology of compartmentalization and denial to such an extreme that here, life itself is turned into a resource to be mined, leaving devastation in its wake. There is nothing new here. Instead of treating human capital as foundational to a successful society, it’s being used the same way as their offshore gas. Burned.

And here also is where the product of that denial emerges as multiple jaw-dropping architectural temples of sport, a gleaming futuristic skyline, steel and glass offerings to the gods of permanence, every comfort either accessible or constructed for the micro-managed spectacle of ‘earthly’ competition, sponsored by all the same ubiquitous multi-planetary corporate brands to be simulated and broadcast in endless detail back to the proletariat, attended by the international glitterati, entirely compatible with an artificial ethos of extreme resort living, creating new standards of excess, but without the inconvenience of interplanetary hyper-sleep. This is not some dystopian future. This is now.

Qatar and the other Gulf States are in a special class of nations driving the global legacy energy system, where the belief in their own illusions is reinforced at every turn while the reality of barely restrained plunder and its real-world consequences is cloaked in PR campaigns and market-speak. By the extremity of their lifestyle, they symbolize an apotheosis of Western nihilism, the radical divorce from ecological foundations and our headlong drive to collapse. There is only a contorted facsimile of belonging here.

One might argue that Qatar is doing everything right. They are conserving their natural assets, diversifying their $300B sovereign wealth fund to hedge against oil price fluctuations, investing in prime real estate in London and New York, shopping malls in Turkey, renewable energy projects in Sub-Saharan Africa, private and public companies throughout the world, venture capital and global tech. They’re catering to international tourists. They’re aggressively reducing methane leakage from their drilling platforms, redesigning their desalination plants, planning for their future and building their renewable portfolio.  But at the same time, as their national carbon footprint falls, the risks are not disappearing: inundation by a rising sea, draining what little aquifer they still have, poisoning the life of the Gulf, human rights, the rights of nature, the living nature of earth.

Bismillah-ir-rahman-ir-rahim. In the name of Allah, The Most Gracious and Compassionate, The Most Merciful…

This sacred phrase, known throughout Islam, is repeated throughout the Qur’an. It is said to contain the essence of the entire Qur’an, even the essence of all religion. With the most receptive heart, utter devotion and with the purest of intentions, practicing Muslims speak these words on a daily basis. It’s not that Qatar is pursuing selfish gains or profit for its own sake. In a devout Islamic nation such as this, largely governed by Sharia Law, leaning into the Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia and the community of its brethren nations, that would contradict religious teachings.

I began by calling Qatar an extreme example. Yet who is to say any nation cannot pursue the benefits of its wealth, share them among its citizens and showcase their skills and generosity to the world? Therein is the advancing and crushingly poignant reality: Qatar, like virtually all nations, no matter how many times the words may be repeated with utmost sincerity, is not on a trajectory to lasting peace or beauty as the Qur’an might have us believe. It cannot reconcile its extractive practices with the costs. Qatar, like the rest of the world, to a greater or lesser degree, is stuck in the same cycle of addiction and shortsightedness. Even with all its so-called wealth, it cannot save itself. This is our ultimate poverty.

State of Excess: I

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these.

The extractive economy is a daring game of chicken we’re playing with ourselves. It’s always been a necessary part of our micro-reality, but only recently have we reached a scale of malignant self-destruction doing irreversible damage to the living environment. We take it for granted as an indispensable feature of modernity. The term ‘climate’ should rightly include extraction among its many references. If applied to the whole of life, climate is not solely about atmospheric or oceanic conditions or the many thousands of other biological effects; it is also about our external and internal worlds reflecting each other. The climate of earth is collapsing. And we are collapsing with it.

If we trace the acceleration of the global warming effect, the loss of ice, acidifying oceans, the threats to food chains, the Sixth Great Extinction, wild tantrums of weather now commonplace, all are paralleled by massive concentration of wealth, the degradation of civil discourse, attacks on science, the corruption of democratic norms, the influence of dark money in politics, feudalization of the economy, spiritual malaise, the destruction of capital in all its forms and the ever-intensifying jockeying to secure vital natural resources. It is a hollowing. Earth as an object of hostile takeover. None of us can truly breathe anymore.

If there were a single place, a petri dish of the fatally hedonistic culture of extraction, consumption, disconnection and the gaping wound of interrupted reciprocity, sustained by an illusion of abundance, it might be found among the Gulf States of the Middle East. Qatar is one of these, perhaps second only to the United Arab Emirates for a standard of living supported entirely by extraction yet deeply insulated from the consequences. Qatar is a parable of earth.

The citizens of Qatar are not oblivious to the issues. Popular sentiment clearly acknowledges the primacy of global warming, the causal relations between fossil fuels, pollution and climate change. They are acutely aware of urban congestion and resource management. Even though government officials, academics and civil society share a consensus that something must be done (not only about the traffic!), personal lifestyle adjustments hold limited appeal. Qatar produces 7000 tons of trash daily. Yet no recycling program, no matter how expertly designed or promoted, can mitigate the emissions from local plants producing 20,000 tons of cement every day. Such a functional disconnect is the definition of un-sustainability. In this semi-constitutional absolute monarchy, ruled by a single family for nearly 200 years, the Emir, Abdullah bin Hamad Al Tahni, has the last word. There are no democratic mechanisms to shift policy as far or as fast as it must go.

The marvel of climate change can be reduced to numbers, but they don’t—and can’t—plumb the depths of the flawed outlook, the psychological mechanisms of denial, except perhaps by applying an analogy of autoimmunity. We are attacking ourselves. The sensual appeal of lifestyles are so comfortable that the thought of any substantive shift in priorities never reaches critical mass. In Qatar as much as anywhere, an inexorable series of self-destructive and irreversible decisions are being made. They are now accompanied by promises to change, failure to change, the cycle repeating with rising guilt followed by self-deception and dissociation. These are the behaviors of an addict. Not all of humanity is addicted, but the addicted are leading the rest of us into the abyss.

Qatar is small. Its total area is only three times greater Mumbai or half the size of Vermont; or, if you prefer, seven times the size of greater London. The amount of arable land per capita is a vanishingly small .005 hectares. The population, having grown 400% since 2000, is still less than three million, but only 12% are citizens. The remaining 88% are foreign workers, largely from South Asia, including hundreds of thousands of unskilled and skilled labourers who came to participate in the promise of Qatar’s selection as the site for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The influx of expats is the reason 70% of the population is between the ages of 25-54 and the reason Qatar has the highest ratio of men to women in that age group in the world, 5:1. But perhaps there’s another reason. In this small group of patriarchal states, restrictions on women’s behavior and movement and the absence of laws clearly criminalizing domestic violence are driving women from these countries altogether.

Qatar is living a schizophrenic culture of extremes—at a precarious edge between the inevitable consequences of extraction and the countervailing abundance it provides.  There is world-leading prosperity, the fourth-highest per capita income behind only Macau, Luxembourg and Singapore. There is high growth, and to the degree possible with average summer temperatures exceeding 40ºC, an illusion of separation from the elements, from anything remotely related to the lived experience or diversity of a jungle, a coral reef or a wooded mountain.

It’s also a tourist destination of mega-theme parks and giant shopping malls, man-made islands and a soon-to-be opened aqua resort with underwater hotel suites. It is known for its architectural design and cultural beauty, and as the leading financial service center of the Middle East. Qatar boasts world-class universities, sports venues, a highly educated technocratic class and its own stunning collection of ancient and modern Islamic Art. The unemployment rate is a microscopic 0.08%. Even though it imports most of its food, it has reclaimed thousands of hectares of desert through irrigation schemes to produce hothouse crops.

L’Essence de Vie

The impact of less than three million people on the global condition may be miniscule, yet the impact of Qatar is far greater than its small numbers would suggest because of extreme energy inefficiency. How is that irrigation supported? Qatar has near-zero surface water and less than 100mm/y in rainfall, 80% of which runs off into the sea. Natural renewable water resources have been estimated at 71m3/per year per capita, far below the water poverty line of 1000m3/y/ca.

Ninety-nine percent of municipal water is produced by energy-intensive conventional thermal desalination. Qataris use 500 liters of water per day per capita (132 gal/d), twice the global average. The water coming out of the tap, the water for washing $2B worth of cars (more than one for every two people) every day, the water for swimming, water for the fountains, the landscaping, the reflecting pools, the water for wudu (ritual cleansing), every bit of water used in Qatar including most of what is used to grow food is also bringing the Persian Gulf closer to becoming a dead zone. And even though Qatar claims the tap water is safe for drinking, most everyone drinks only bottled water.

Sixty percent of all global capacity for extracting fresh water from the ocean is in the Gulf States. There are over 1000 desalination plants ringing the Gulf from Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, from Bahrain to the UAE and Oman. As demand continues to rise, new and larger ones are constantly being built. Together they are impacting the salinity of the Persian Gulf, releasing hyper-saline water with chlorines into an ocean that already has a 25% higher saline content than the average ocean. By 2050, the salinity of the Gulf will be more than twice that of either the Red Sea or the Mediterranean.

Desalination plants also release sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in quantities exceeding international standards. The Persian Gulf is already a shallow sea, averaging less than 50m deep. Combined with a high evaporation rate, insufficient freshwater replenishment and multiple sources of dumping such as animal farms, sewage, oil spills, industrial outfalls and fertilizer factories, along with desalination along the entire coast, not to mention the millions of gallons of oil deliberately released by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the Gulf is slowly becoming a dead sea. Algal blooms known as the Red Tide, generated by heat and an influx of nutrients from anthropogenic sources, are reducing oxygen content, killing fish and intermittently forcing temporary shutdowns of desalination in some areas.

In recognition of the precarity of water resources, Qatar is building five mega-reservoirs, intending to store emergency supplies according to estimated demand in 2036. They will likely convert the surface of these reservoirs to floating solar installations, further dropping overall carbon emissions. But alas, only a drop in that bucket.

Climate, Energy & The Environment

Qatar has the highest per capita CO2 emissions of any nation except Kuwait, again, partly because of extremely inefficient consumption. Emission levels also reflect the extremely low natural biocapacity of the nation to produce the basics of survival, yet the population is entirely divorced from the costs. Water is free. Energy is free. Education and health care are free. Only one nation, Iceland, uses more energy per capita than Qatar, though Iceland’s energy is 90% geothermal, which delivers 4-5 times the energy of fossil fuels.

Qatar’s wealth derives from the third-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world (25 trillion cubic meters), mostly offshore, providing 85% of its national revenues. It also has 15 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and is a major exporter of petrochemicals and fertilizers. Unfortunately, Qatar considers natural gas to be “clean energy.” In fact, it’s only half as dirty as coal and emits as much as 10x more carbon than some forms of biomass—of which Qatar has none.

The government, in concert with twenty-two members of the Pan-Arab League, intends to diversify its energy base. This is a progressive plan, but it’s been slow to develop. There was no renewable energy base as recently as 2015. The current goal is to reach 20% renewables by 2030. This is not solely out of environmental concern, but part of a drive to save its natural gas for export instead of domestic consumption. A huge solar installation, Siraj-1 (700MW, 10 sq. km), is slated for commissioning in August 2021 and will be used in part to power a ‘carbon neutral’ World Cup. Siraj-1 will produce the cheapest utility-scale solar energy in the world. On the other hand, dust driven by desert winds will likely make it the most difficult solar plant to keep clean and operational at peak capacity.

Qatar’s obligation to the UNFCCC and the Paris Accords was, as with all other nations, to submit Intended National Defined Contribution statements declaring a commitment to sustainable practices, education, research and implementation of improved technologies to reduce emissions. The fact that 10% of its land area is no more than one meter above sea level, that 18% is no more than five meters above sea level and that 96% of the population lives in that zone is a stark reminder of Qatar’s vulnerability to sea level rise.

Nevertheless, the music continues, and even more loudly. As with so many other signatories to the Paris Accords, specific emissions targets were never declared, and all intentions were entirely voluntary and subject to change to any time. While they are demonstrating a commitment to mitigation and adaptation, the key statements in the INDC, virtually identical to similar statements of other nations, provide loopholes to choose development over environmental concerns at any time.

Present as Prologue

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of its failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance.

When I think back over the past couple of decades and ask how was it and when my thinking shifted from imagining it was possible to find the political will to confront climate change to realizing social collapse was far more likely, I can point to a number of inflection points. It’s not quite so easy to assign specific turning points, but there are some events marking the passage toward my current position.

In 2012, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone published a book called Active Hope. The subtitle was ‘How to Face The Mess We Are In Without Going Crazy.’ Segueing from anti-nuclear activism that began in the 80s, Joanna has spent the past forty years helping people access deep feeling for what is being lost and then to watch a fresh and grounded conviction to act emerge. But seeing that particular book appear was a signal to me that she was acknowledging our intensifying circumstances and the increasing difficulty of not only processing all the emotions associated with the incremental decomposition of nature and culture, but also of realizing a positive outcome of The Great Turning. I wondered when active hope or, if you will, radical hope becomes desperation? If we imagined hope as a regenerative resource, is it inexhaustible? When does active hope become hopium– an intoxicating strategy of pacification, helplessness and rising delusion?

To add some context, Obama’s weak stance and the failure of negotiations at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009 were also part of my turning, particularly upon learning that the fossil fuel propaganda campaign was deliberately targeting that event. In 2013, I was also collaborating on a political strategy to promote a carbon tax in the USA, submitting it for critique and confronting the obstacles to that effort. Ultimately, I found that process to be deeply dispiriting.

Not too long after that episode was the Paris Agreement of 2015, when the INDCs, Individual National Declared Contributions (to global decarbonization) were declared voluntary. Of course it would be naive of anyone to imagine nations agreeing to self-generated required contributions and submitting to enforcement, whatever that could mean. But voluntary contributions were also guaranteed to expose the entire effort to be more platitude than action, particularly in the case of the biggest polluters, which of course meant the United States. And it was.

These are moments I’m calling inflection points. They all had antecedents, a series of episodes dropping like grains of sand on one side of a scale until suddenly their accumulation shifts the entire balance away from the probability of avoiding systemic collapse to one of guaranteeing it. Accompanying all of this is a process of letting go of hope, similar to the five stages of grief. But I’d be wary of trying to fit myself into boxes that might be too small. Regardless, that negotiation with all the familiar names is about the ultimate acceptance of endings, the contemplation of mysteries we enter most gingerly.

So here we are. As with grief, the entire process is not one of giving up so much as opening to something new, regardless of its mystery. When do we let go of bargaining? When do we loosen our grip on a false future of endless beginnings or, to put it another way, step outside the law and induced conventions sustaining a false future to expose ourselves to the truth (and terror) of something far less familiar, but which is becoming ever more likely? 

And anyway, was that even the future to which we were–or are–clinging? Or was it the past? A past in which the so-called promises of modernity could become ever more inclusive and the fantasy of personal and collective prosperity could continue indefinitely? In those terms, we’ve not been headed into the future at all. Our increasingly desperate grip has always been on the past–the conveniences we enjoy and particularly the ideology of endless growth. The culture war, the current battle of narratives is between those who deny it altogether, those who believe we can manage climate change without really giving up very much, that we can keep most everything we have and still call ourselves ‘sustainable’-and those who believe we must explore and design radically different lifestyles based on a new definition of abundance. What if nature has another agenda entirely?

The real future, if we can stop lying, is so overwhelming we may not fully grasp what is virtually imminent. Thus, we turn our gaze to the past, the recent past, to preserve the fantasy of human omniscience, the fantasy of our unlimited capacity to manage our way through every obstacle, every rising tide, every rapid in the downstream flow of history. Party like it’s 1999! All of this is fueled by vapid pronouncements from the technology sector, the advocates of bioengineering and the offices of politicians bought by fossil fuel interests. In fact, we have no idea precisely what will finally convince us of a collapsing biosphere. But we know the signs are all around us.

Releasing our grip on the future—telling the truth of the moment—is a landmark principle of psycho-logical health—admitting what is—allowing us to deal with ‘reality.’ At the same time, we are also trying to modulate extreme emotional responses, rising solastagia and deepening disorientation, which are negotiated in a specific system of the brain devoted to survival. While we don’t want to trigger impulsive, personally damaging or anti-social behaviors, we do want to retain enough forebrain function to generate positive corrective measures.

We–and by that I mean we in the US–may be a single extreme climate event away from triggering a mass shift in public attitudes about what is on the way (several are already underway), what mass media is still timid (or worse, negligent) about addressing. But this is where we find ourselves wading into a swamp of uncertainty, disagreement and potentially dangerous outcomes that were wholly unanticipated at the beginning. We don’t want panic to become even mildly contagious–like the pandemic. And besides, a significant segment of American culture is already being bombarded with triggering messages generating anti-social behaviors against their own interests, which are also threatening the collective well-being of the nation.

In trying to temper the information flow to avoid elevating mass anxiety, fear or contagious hopelessness, we remain deeply embedded in the territory of complacency. When Greta Thunberg addressed the annual World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019, she said, “I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day, and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” 

Meanwhile, managing social behavior, refusing to form a vision of a collective response to the realities upon us or being determined to ‘both sides’ it all is robbing us of the opportunity to convey clearly how fragile our situation really is. Everything matters more than ever if we ever expect to become someone’s ancestor, because everything, the wake-up call and the suffering of the past 18 months, the dislocation, the uncertainty, the disruption of commerce, the loss of stability, the political and economic inequalities, the creative energy and social innovation, the conflicting moralities and the redefinition of community are all just a rehearsal for a rapidly advancing future.

The following is an obscure Facebook post from 2017, written by a nameless founder of the Into The Wild Festival:

And finally the great ancient god of nature, of the wild places, of the muddy-brooks and the golden hills, of the damp forests and the hidden glades, the protector of beasts, of horned and hoofed, he of the wild-lichen eye-brows, musk-eared pungent aromas swelling in through the ether, playing his deep octave of enchantment on his bone flute from beyond the veils, from under the other worlds. He curls his misty eyebrow towards humanity once again, reminding them that their tiny insignificant lives are mere dew-drops on the vast garden of existence. All their self-help seminars and self-important narcissistic endeavors are nothing but the froth of waves under the infinite sun-rays of existence. 

You can wash your hands, but you cannot wash away the wild, the mysterious, ravaging ferocious tenacity of the world. You can try to blame it on 5G or 4G or GG. You can create as many concepts as you like, but in the end, nature will rule with wild and ecstatic bloodthirsty longing to take us all home to where we began, the deep dark emptiness where everything arises and begins, time without end. Pan, the original horned god will once again step out of the shadows with his name on the tongues of all beings, pandemic, pandemonium, panic, panacea, all bursting forth like wild flowers yearning to kiss the sky.

In this realm there is no good or bad, high or low, rich or poor, just the wild abandoned expression of life and death forever dancing in the orgasmic Milky Way of existence, radiant in its potential. So, we are nature in our deepest dreaming, before we civilized ourselves into square boxes of ready meals. We are life and death. We are the earth-woven lovers of the wild. We are that radiant mysterious emptiness. We are Pan. We are all people. Listen to the call of all beings deep in the dark of night, at the cusp of dawn or dusk and you will hear your ancient voice forever singing you back home.

We are all Pan, as god, as archetype, as a voice of the irrational. Pan travels deep in our psychic underworld. Nature is Pan, both beautiful and treacherous. By exiling him from our natural terrain, by dislocating or repressing the divine Pan from the pantheon of gods, we are dishonored. We lose ourselves. Eventually we suffer the consequences of that repression in the form of emerging tortuous pathologies.

We are in the midst of an awakening, a rough transition from the dream of modernity and the emerging reality of our failing, if not wholly false, promises of universal prosperity and abundance. That was never really part of the deal and now, with all the Pan-words dancing before us, the true costs are mounting.

How will it all Pan out?

The Dark Side of Modernity

Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

For a word being thrown around so casually these days, one may wonder what exactly modernity means. It’s certainly everything we might initially assume it is. But let’s tease that apart. It’s been defined as a historical period that could have started as far back as Medieval times. Sometimes it’s regarded as the light arising from the Enlightenment, or even beginning sometime in the 19th century with the industrial revolution.

The most inclusive definition associates modernity with a number of historical developments: nations, languages, industrialization, mercantilism, capitalism, urbanization, mass literacy, mass media, representative government and mainly also a shift from traditional culture, meaning a proliferation of things we do when we’re not entirely focused on survival, and systems of knowledge, to the triumph of rationalism and scientific materialism. One may include a number of positive aspects to modernity such as secular culture, evolutionary thinking, developments in psychology, medicine, philosophy and emancipation. But especially now, we can’t avoid also associating environmental devastation with modernity, which is now undermining the very stability of culture and modernity itself.

A formal definition of modernity, according to Walter Mignolo’s substantial body of work on the subject, should begin with the Renaissance, coinciding with the intention of Western Europe to embark on the imperial project which had several faces and which was rationalized as bringing civilization to the New World, saving the world for Christianity and which then evolved into what we now call capitalism.

However we paint it, Modernity is synonymous with colonialism and thus, racism is inherent to it. Could the modern world look as it does today with the current economic regimes as if no imperial intentions had ever existed, no massive transport of black bodies from Africa to North and South America, no East India Company, no appropriation of native lands, forced and unpaid labor, the imposition of governance and financial obligations? I think not.

Thus, hidden behind the rhetoric of modernity, economic practices dispensed with human lives, and knowledge justified racism and the inferiority of human lives that were naturally considered dispensable.

—The Darker Side of Western Modenity

Dark bodies weren’t granted full humanity. And white bodies rationalized their moral responsibility as social systems, spiritual practices or bodies of knowledge were systematically destroyed. We continue to feel the effects of the colonial mentality 500 years later not only through globalization and neoliberal economics but through the definition of development itself and the division of the world into so-called developed and less developed cultures. The term ‘Third World’ was a French invention.

Colonialism did not advance solely as a mercantile or as an imperial military adventure. It was a religious and cultural force propagated through the cracking of indigenous linguistic code, the imposition of new languages, geographical mapping, religious indoctrination, economic subjugation, wiping out cultural memory, arbitrarily defining territories according to political or economic expediency, destroying centuries of cultural wealth, appropriating land and vast material wealth, creating a domestic class of proxy colonialists who benefited directly from the economic subjugation of their brethren and generating entrenched bureaucracies to sustain the inertia of political systems primarily serving colonial interests.

Colonialism emerged from and as what we know as western civilization, ultimately defining modernity in terms of politics, economics, religion and culture. The imperial project was to extend the definitions of civilization, language, philosophy, politics and economics to the colonized world. That initially included Latin America and Africa, extending into the Islamic world and South Asia. The definition of development itself was determined by the western colonial enterprise and persists to this day as defined by Wall street, the IMF & the World Bank. It’s primary purveyors are government agencies and diplomacy, clearing the way for multinational corporations backed, in case additional persuasion becomes necessary, by military might. Even as the overt manifestations of European imperialism dissolved in the mid-20th century, the American imperial project in the Western Hemisphere over the past 150 years is well known

Perhaps the greatest impact of colonialism was to control knowledge and especially the definition of knowledge. The definition of knowledge codifies the essential power relations between races, genders and cultures and became encoded in languages, beginning with Spanish, Portuguese, German and French, all rooted in Latin, extending more recently in English. Since knowledge and its definition is held primarily in western hands over the past few centuries, the way we think about problems and their solutions also arises from within that codification.

In that respect, the rhetoric of modernity is a pernicious monoculture of ideas to the extent that now modernity has become hostile to culture. Like the cannibalistic psychosis of Wetiko, it creeps into all aspects of life in the form of social media, advertising, mainstream political discourse. Modernity constantly encroaches upon and threatens to consume decolonial thinking, diversity, extremity, classifying certain people as outlaws, certain thoughts as unsanctioned and presuming to define normality, centrism and the norms of authentic self-expression. This is modernity cannibalizing itself to sanitize culture for the sake of preserving its own ever-narrowing definition.

We are also in the midst of an uprising over who gets to set the terms of discourse, who gets to define and preserve the codification of white innocence, superiority and patriarchal economic hegemony into the political and economic rhetoric set forth over the centuries of the colonial enterprise. The latest skirmish in this ongoing war is about the 1619 Project, which, by unearthing real history and bringing its unsavory truths to the forefront of modern awareness, lays bare the principle that white privilege only lives by keeping its own past buried.

White patriarchy has had the floor for 500 years and now the plantation systems are breaking down everywhere. There are popular movements with a different idea rising in virtually every culture now fighting for survival and presenting a rising threat to the owners and guards of the prison without walls and the prisons with walls. Repression and authoritarianism are the last remaining tools of control. Witness the right-wing backlash against Bolivia’s Evo Moralies, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and the rise of Bolsonaro and the jailing of Lulo De Silva in Brazil, not to mention the increasingly desperate and increasingly lawless measures by the white minority in America to retain minority rule.

What was taken centuries ago cannot be recovered. Inasmuch as we identify with and join the shifting communities of rebellion, art, theater, feminism, resurgent indigenous voices, economic cooperation, the recovery of ancient wisdom, we become fugitives from the plantation to construct a new economy. As decoloniality and the critique of modernity becomes more elaborate and encompassing, it is increasingly clear that we will no longer accept the structures of domination on any level of human activity and relationships, most particularly in regard to the natural world.

The signs of backlash are everywhere. Nikole Hannah-Jones being denied tenure by the University of North Carolina School of Journalism. Republicans voting en bloc against a Black women becoming Director of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The refusal of Big Pharma to support generic vaccines being distributed to less affluent countries. The sudden reversal of the NFL to now regard the claims of neurological damage by black former players as equal to those of white players. How much more systemic can you get? These are actions and perspectives which all arise from and reveal the vestiges of the racist colonial mindset.

Reciprocity

True reciprocity, or what we could call emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins, directions or destinations.

Reciprocity is a word we could use for the rhizomatic nature of life, or perhaps paradoxically, the social mechanics of earth. We are undeniably entangled in perpetual subliminal conversations and exchange with each other and the natural world. Reciprocity expresses our interdependence, whether conscious or not. The limits of that reciprocal relationship likely extend beyond any rational definition we might rely on. We can see ourselves in a new light, not as a single central species mastering life, but as just one species (the youngest species) sharing a vast web of life. We are learning this the hard way. 

Reciprocity, or what might well be called emergence, is an omni-variant, non-linear dynamic beyond our feeble attempts to determine chronology, origins or destinations. Much as we might wish to, or to be tied to the habit of gazing into a rainforest noticing only the layered canopy, the explosion of color, the cacophony of voices or the humidity, we cannot see the whole unless we also notice what is underfoot, buried in the rotting vegetation, the decomposing bodies, the leaf molds, the micro-organisms, the mycelium, the death amidst all that life. In fact, the death is giving rise to life. Without these, there is no rainforest, no reciprocity. Some relationships are visible, some invisible. Everything we are and all we do is part of that entanglement. 

In a culture that teaches and so efficiently reinforces separation for so long, we as individuals are reduced to atomized centers of resources to be mined and harvested. We have reached a point at which even our autonomy of thought and action are under threat. It is critical to disengage from the machine of Progress to discover and enact a new way of living closer to the reality of our place in the web of life. We are being called upon by unparalleled change to engage all our faculties, our vision and intuition, the ears and eyes, the sensations we have forgotten to notice and the capacities we use to listen for foreign and fugitive guidance to recover or discover for the first time the basis of our relations with each other and the more-then-human world.

We have to search our histories, poking around in the ashes, into the sources of imagery, before memory, before place, before blood, before nations, to the tribal, to the bones of our original values, to the individual cells of community where life is incubated and regenerated, where our relationships were not things to cultivate, where we watched each other grow and participated in the lives and transitions of everyone we knew. Somewhere in our past, even if only in our genetic memory, we have all known deprivation, displacement and domination. All is embedded in the epigenetics of the human story. More recently we have come to know the soulless commodification of fellow human beings. We have moved beyond some or all of these to be where we are and to carry that knowing with us. That is the common legacy of our time. 

The lifestyle I enjoy was built on the contributions of a billion partners, both human and non-human. For 200 years, capitalism has depended on the establishment of unequal relationships, hierarchies of privilege among all those partners. The unraveling we see around us is the legacy of that inequality, including the racism perpetuating them. We have all become complicit along the way, with colonialism and slavery, with those hierarchies of privilege, with entitlement and subjugation. We are the benefactors of exploitation and violence and we live in a nation built upon that violence and which continues to thrive on the suffering of others every day. 

The bill is coming due. I have a deep grief, emptiness and sickening feeling as I ponder all of this. But feeling guilty is also a perversion, an inversion of victimhood. It can be immobilizing, but it’s time to put it away and name and claim a different way. 

Revelation & Recovery

The appeal of post-activism–a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool, is an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change.

Deep Adaptation was a welcome revelation. I was suddenly relieved of pushing the rock uphill. I was diverted to more productive activity: facing unmediated and unfiltered reality and acting accordingly. These urgent times require that we slow down. I could put my full attention on the inner work of resilience and restoration, taking a slower and deeper journey into its meaning, simplifying and carefully extending myself to live a version of small-scale sustainability. Under current circumstances, as I’ve said, this seemed to be imperative.

Deep Adaptation has been criticized as a regression into despair, doom and disengagement. But I’ve never seen it as refuge of defeatism, more like a dispassionate assessment of reality. Parallel to this shift in attention, is the appeal of post-activism— a walk into the desert beyond the last swimming pool. It’s a cognitive jailbreak from a belief in objective reality. It’s an escape from human centrality, an intention to tend the wounds we have inflicted on our world, on ourselves, by presuming humans alone are the drivers of social change. It’s a turn toward recovering and redefining community away from the parameters of Progress. Conventional activism is an attempt to escape the prison (a diffractive prism?) of prevailing conditions. How is it that despite all our efforts, we largely remain in that prison, redefining ourselves over and over according to terms we can barely grasp. We are like fish trying to find water, immersed in it so deeply, so completely that we can only speculate about its nature. Post-activism is somewhere beyond all of that.

At the same time, as my health drives my attention inward, my sense of conventional (inner or outer) agency ebbs. To a degree, my definition of agency still resides in the conventional realm. If I tried to unravel this mystery, I could easily turn to despair and fatalism. As my world shrinks, I recall the vast spaciousness of mind, allow the boundaries of ego to expand and loosen, reconsidering influences steering life far beyond any imagined boundaries I might normally contemplate. I puzzle over whether and how the entire course of life has prepared me for its closing chapters. Or whether, more likely, there is no such thing as preparation, only incrementally deepening encounters with the reality of our material limitations. Clearly, there are still revelations to be had. That, revelation, if I could name a clear intention governing all of it, is what it shall be for me.

Upon arriving in Durham in October 2019, I was pressed to make my housing choices quickly, taking my health into consideration. I chose easy, low maintenance, self-contained and accessible. Any possibility of participating in building much resilience into my community or immediate surroundings was marginalized. Taking a wider view, making a commitment to a slower, smaller lifestyle requires opening to revelation from sources not previously considered. I have found these in familiar sources as well as in new voices now propagating via online communities connecting in ways we might not have explored if Covid had not come along. 

We are entering territory never previously occupied by humans—of multiple catastrophic events (Covid, climate change and Trump) arresting, rupturing and reversing the entire course of human progress, stopping us in our tracks—like a massive volcano erupting and darkening the global sky, like Nuclear Winter. This is the precipice of Peak Humanity. In some ways we’re already on the downside, heading south. The possibility of arresting the inertia of the Industrial Growth Machine is a small sliver of light barely escaping the massive black hole of Business-As-Usual.

There’s further revelation—and recovery—in realizing the depth and nature of our entanglements with the natural world and each other. We are arrested by boundaries suddenly becoming much softer than we normally realize. They are mutable and transient, more like filters, permeable and highly specific, both protective and yet facilitating communication. Less foreboding. COVID is a messenger of our porosity, a call to examine our intimate relations with the micro-biome, with ecologies interrupted, sundered and thrown into chaos. 

In this respect, COVID is also more of a revelation than any previous fugitive organism leaping across the boundaries of its normal habitat because of its deadly nature and global impact. It’s bringing us crashing back to earth from our drunken binge of extraction, acquisition and destruction. Investors and futurists may call it a Black Swan, but it’s more than that. It’s the latest event piercing the myth of separation. A more significant event propagating greater collapse-awareness could not have been engineered by any deliberate effort. We are now glimpsing a version of the future and being clearly shown what measures will be necessary to respond to similar events in addition to whatever the climate has in store for us.

To enter any recovery, all of these revelations must be digested. Also revealed are our capacities of trust, compassion, courage and a new purpose.  It’s time to recover, dust off and refurbish these exiled capacities to embody our reliance on each other, to remember we do not exist outside of relationship. Nothing is itself, by itself. As Zach Bush mentioned in a recent interview, COVID has awakened and spurred us to move from an adrenaline society to an oxytocin society, restoring the inner landscape, awakening to reciprocity. This is what we are finding in the streets, online, in wider collaborative initiatives. Every awakening is a recovery, stimulating a desire for more.

Rage & Resignation

I’ve been in a rage since before the financial collapse of 2008. Well, actually, a good deal longer than that. Perhaps since Bush v Gore. OK, let’s say I was tuned into the truth about Bill Clinton before it became patently obvious: a neoliberal excuse-maker, prevaricator, manipulator, triangulator, blah, blah, blah. There was a reason he was called “slick Willie.” I’m not even mentioning Vietnam, Nixon, Kissinger, and the thieves and sociopaths of the GOP operating ever since the early 80s, 9/11, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War. 

Plenty of reasons to be in a rage. But never mind. If I just picked 2008 as a base, it was the bailout and Obama’s (or should I say Eric Holder’s) failure to stand up for the rule of law by never prosecuting or even stepping on the toes of the financial elites. Not one. That was when “too big to fail,” was unveiled. An amazing piece of PR. Now we’re pondering whether humanity is too big to fail. Spoiler alert: nope.

Over the past 10 years, this rage alternately morphed into despair, denial, resignation and dropout about the climate issue as we’ve witnessed one failure after another, one milquetoast policy after another and terminal prevarication. I even had some words for Obama (2012) about his pursuit of America’s endless foreign wars:

your words fall
like an avalanche of dry bones
once resounding against the sky
now empty echoing in our foundations
once the sinuous awakening curvatures 
of smothered and gasping values
now falling into an abyss 
of conflict and easy temptation
stunted flowers becoming bitter fruit 
they fall away from your stunned mouth
knitting together only shame and excuses
for all the death they foretell

I couldn’t have said so at the time, but about 2014, I reached the end of my rope when I went to congress to lobby for a carbon tax. If that’s not enough to pull the rug out from under any remaining spark of inspiration one might have, nothing is. It is and always was Kabuki, steeped in an august veneer of propriety, sanctimonious deliberation, the worship of barnacle-encrusted tradition, self-serving appropriation of mythology and rhetorical sleight of tongue. Dishonesty, thy name is Congress.

For a good while now we’ve been able to name the entire criminal gang, the ones most responsible for our predicament. We know what they knew and when they knew it. We know their tactics. We know who sold out humanity for profit, who has lied, deliberately and expertly clouded the issue and mounted massive misinformation campaigns. We know their henchmen and how they obstructed popular sentiment, cherry-picked and distorted climate data, attacked experts, threw faux experts into our path, sentenced billions of earth’s most vulnerable beings to deluge, displacement, deprivation and death. All expendable. The greatest crimes against humanity, bar none. The Holocaust times 10,000. Species-suicide promulgated by sociopaths. Not one of them has been seen or is ever likely to be seen in the familiar orange jumpsuit. 

But then, parallel to the rage, coexisting in strange symbiotic temperance, is my denial, my rage about having to be angry about any of this in the first place and my cynical desire to run in the opposite direction and live a life of careless oblivion—which at times gets the better of me. Resignation. And why shouldn’t it? I’m entitled to do that simply based on the fact that I’ve already lived most of my life, a simple life as it is now. I’m not wealthy enough to afford a real high emission lifestyle. Well, except air travel. There’s that. At the same time, living that smaller footprint life, I remain complicit. 

Even though my personal mitigating measures are so miniscule as to not even register on a lifetime scorecard, I fall back into my cultural upbringing commanding me to repair the world (tikkun olam), even though not making any mitigating gestures makes about as much negative difference as any positive difference I could measure by making such gestures. Perhaps these are the terms of a new post-activism. But post-activism cannot make promises. It can only expand to define the problem. And even that is a risky proposition. The dilemma lingers—believing we can individually make a difference, which allows us to feel good–without really making any real difference whatsoever?

Which brings me closer to the present moment. Having realized some years ago we are heading toward, or have already passed, critical tipping points guaranteeing the worst climate impacts and having exhausted my taste for barking up the same old trees and being painfully aware, despite all the promise of zero-emission technology (which was not catching up to fossil fuels fast enough until the appearance of COVID), of the nature and power of the fossil fuel lobby and the sociopaths of Wall Street driving the economic machine inexorably killing us, I stumbled upon Deep Adaptation, which doesn’t quibble about our remaining chances to throw any serious wrenches into the gears of Business As Usual or place false hope in persuasion by rational argument. 

Instead, Deep Adaptation names the Anthropocene as already an era of failure, a colossal crashing to earth. It could also be named the era of The Planet Striking Back. Unfortunately, our dithering miscalculations now threaten human viability. On some world which remains foreign to me, it may suffice to burrow deeper into Buddhist practice to discover non-confrontational or non-aggressive ways to address these issues, and they may well exist, but most of the time I lean more toward channeling rage into creative pursuits–and this is not a time to drop out. Fortunately, a significant cadre separating itself from the homo sapiens death cult realizes the only sensible response to climate impacts we’ve been failing to forestall for 40 years is by utterly re-shaping the ethos of human presence. 

Not that Deep Adaptation is a pioneering idea in this respect. There are collapse-aware people all over the world, still massively outnumbered by the oblivious, but nevertheless creating new institutions, small and large-scale adaptive and resilient communities everywhere and propagating new thought. Technology provides the means to accelerate these ideas as never before. Unfortunately, it also provides the same benefit to counter-narratives. But while those local actions and personal transformative ideologies are taking hold, the mass resistance and uprising necessary to slow down the carbon emission juggernaut had never fully made itself known until the twin conditions of the pandemic and mass resistance to systemic racism became the means to realize in a new way how one condition is all conditions and that justice for some cannot be separated from justice for all. 

Rather than an invading alien, Covid-19 has proved to be the monster under the bed, a goblin from our past and a message from the future, humanity’s zombie rejected Other. We are impossibly entangled with the biological world, having corrupted ecological codes to such a degree the system is coming back upon us. Covid has put us on pause, mirroring our failure, hubris, ignorance, arrogance and the inequality on which they all depend. And how do we respond? Reflexively, automatically, identically to the medical approach, pitting humans against all invasive organisms, the easy way, the only way we know: War! Demanding a reinforcement of human centrality and control.

‘All we know’ is a perfect example of how our responses to problems perpetuate the problem: War against the virus (social distancing and other measures) followed by a popular uprising against the measures taken to defeat the virus. To view the virus in this way is bring us even closer to the next pandemic…or at least a perpetuation of this one. We have no idea how to do with-nessing, stepping all the way back from our imagined control and being with, quietly enough, even if only for a moment, to realize we are the source of our deepening agonies and that the conventional model of responding is only making things worse. These are moments when resignation overtakes me.

Embodiment: The New Economy

Embodiment is being fully connected, fundamentally related to each other and to the natural world. We come home to the sacred dimension of life, to our Greater Self, to a dynamic equilibrium of inner mechanical, cognitive and sensory forces interacting with memory and feeling. We name such experience ‘Wholeness.’

The experience of physicality is the full habitation of our sensory and emotional space. There is no thought, or at least no need for thought, no need for interpretation. In its full depth, embodiment is a  sense of reality as physical nature itself, distinct from a larger container of mind or heart.

Does the mind shape the body or the reverse? Does the mind exist independently of the body? Sixty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Phenomenology of Perception) decided, in direct contradiction to Cartesian dualism, that we perceive and conceptualize everything somatically: processing, referencing, interpreting and responding to a continuous flow of physical sensation and perception. With this in mind, it’s easy to say consciousness itself arises in the body directly from intrinsic biochemical activity. The term infers the subjective experience arising in the body, the experience of the body…and the body of experience, are unitary, non-dual, in which all experience is subjective. There is no Other.

Embodiment also has meaning because it refers to our intrinsic familiarity with something. Knowing something “without words” implies comprehension of our experience at a feeling and image level. We ‘know’ at a sensory level where movement and memory overlap, before interpretation or any belief can occur. Prior to any specific mental awareness or conscious brain function, ‘knowing’ is differentiated from any intellectual or cognitive awareness. Our subjectivity is incarnate. We ‘know’ that we can ‘know. ’This is also a key principle of non-duality.

In the fully embodied state, the distinctions between mind and emotion become blurred. We enter the domain of the feeling mind,  a realization of presence. The immediacy of the present moment opens space for dispassionate observation, also known as mindfulness. If such awareness arises from within, then becoming embodied means we are more conscious of our consciousness, more aware of Awareness. We realize ourselves in a place, in a nearly timeless moment, apart from the past or the future. We are not distracted by habitually reformulating the past to satisfy an old need or to avoid an old memory. Nor are we attempting to manipulate the present to perpetuate a limiting belief about the future. We are simply here in the economy of the moment, where we may fully realize the abundance of meaningful relations.

Embodiment is the experience of being fully connected. We are fundamentally related to each other and to the natural world. In the broadest sense we come home to the sacred dimension of life, to our Greater Self, to a dynamic equilibrium of inner mechanical, cognitive and sensory forces interacting with memory and feeling. We name such experience ‘Wholeness.’

Can this experience be cultivated? Yes, of course. It has been the subject of countless practices for millennia. We experience the fullness of embodiment in peak moments of sustained physical exertion. We experience complete immersion into a felt sense of wholeness in lovemaking, deep contemplation or in moments of deeply loving and spiritual connections with others. We experience embodiment in dance and in structured movement such as yoga, Tai Chi, Chi Gung and many other practices.

Meditation is an embodiment practice because in its most elementary form we deliberately attend to the biology of the moment, the movement of breath, the settling into a comforting physical ease while quieting the mind. More advanced practice intends to bring the discursive mind into higher relief, bringing our inner process into consciousness. Awakening from this semi-conscious dream state, the random dance of continuous and habitual mental activity is to bring us closer to being fully present and more fully embodied.

This is a revolutionary act because we live in a time in which our attention is a commodity to be exploited, colonized and harvested for profit. This is the business model of the global tech giants.  The logical conclusion of this continuous assault on our capacity for focused presence is the clinical description of ADD. Attention deficit is pandemic. Losing the capacity to swim in the sublime inner worlds of feeling and imagination generates distorted, disconnected and addictive behaviors.

Taking the time to go into silence is a process of reclaiming the inner space where we reflect on and connect to the sacred domain of the inner commons, where our resources may be buried, but not tarnished. It is only by regenerating a capacity for calm uncluttered presence of mind that we can even begin to access our relationship to the vitality of life.

Fortunately, our attention is not something to be permanently extracted from us like a vein of raw material. It is a renewable resource. We have the capacity to access and explore and regenerate the inner commons and connect to the depth of existence, which is the birthright of being human, where all we know becomes a springboard to all we can imagine. We must renew it on a regular basis or we will lose capacity for imagination and creativity.

Instead of mindlessly operating on automatic pilot, we become mindful, developing and deepening the capacity for observation without reflexive engagement or reactivity. We meet ourselves as we are, with all the wounds and pain and flawed operating systems perpetuating our suffering, our grasping and adorning our identities and all the other accessory behaviors of a life we imagine will bring us happiness.

More importantly, nurturing the capacity to release ourselves from intellect, we immerse ourselves in the feeling space of our physical presence and venture into the heart of a Greater Self, an integral version of somatic experience, economics, politics and spirituality. We deliberately become available for manifesting an exchange of value that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with wealth. In finding our selves in the fullness of subjectivity, we find our personal economy, our true nature and the source of all natural capital. We enter the journey of exploring communion and learning how to manage our place, our home, our community, our planet.

Occupying our fullness and developing relational skills in every interactive dimension of life is to enter a transformative process of becoming a living embodied system consciously connected to the larger whole of Life and therefore directly influencing political and economic relations of the whole from a deeply grounded dimension. Reforming a system that is only becoming increasingly corrupt is not the answer, of course. What we are looking for is becoming a ‘living’ economy, nested in a layered living system. That includes the use of art, satire, humor, all the weirdness, perversity and raw authenticity, whatever it turns out to be.

These principles require structural change of our current economy toward equitable allocation of resources, benefitting the greatest number of people without sacrificing the ecosystem, democracy or personal fulfillment. Whether one is indicting the phantom wealth of the Wall Street casino or aligning with a sacred economy, all agree the current macro structure and operational rules of our political economy guarantee radical wealth inequity, environmental degradation, spiritual malaise and bizarre insulated tribal enclaves of increasingly aberrant behavior, divorced from any semblance of ethics or morality. The plainly antihuman nature of the old and dying economy as well as its bad actors and apologists is a by-product of warped individualism and the hyper-competitive pursuit of narrow self-interest essential to the perpetual growth imperative.

What is required of the individual who ushers in a different paradigm? The nested systems of the biological world mimicking the same operational principles at all levels are useful as a metaphor of a transformational process occurring intra- and inter-personally to vitalize the change we seek. In other words, aside from wishing to see large-scale changes in the way we relate to money and wealth, we might well ask what are the transformative changes bringing us closer to embodying the new economy within ourselves?

Coming fully into our form of life as human, dropping the vestiges of human superiority, reinterpreting our place in the natural world, we enter a realm of knowledge long abandoned by scientific materialism. We redefine the meaning of wealth. It no longer has anything to do with the exploitive, inequitable, artificial and profoundly distorted derivative world of energetic exchange we call money. It has everything to do with an entirely different metric of value: our communion with others and all life.

What is the currency of an embodied living economy? The answer should be obvious. The currency is relationship. It is authenticity itself. The currency at the heart of an emerging medium of transformational human exchange has to be rooted in our true nature and capacities. That can only occur through an unrelenting and uncompromising process of unwrapping and interactive discovery. Such an inquiry into both our unique essence and our interdependence incrementally strips away the false currencies that have grown up around us.

We thought the old economy was about money—having it, getting more and keeping it. We are learning that it was really about our relationship to money, not the money itself. And lately, let’s say particularly in the last 60-70 years, that relationship has become a perverted expression of both the best and the worst of the complicated ways we use it to express ourselves.

The enduring currency, the only reality we have to exchange with each other is ourselves. Money may be a symbol of who we are, but as is so often said: it is the map, not the territory. We can reinvent ourselves according to a different set of criteria: the authenticity of our purpose and the manner in which we serve our selves and others. In redefining the true currency of human exchange, we also redefine wealth, generosity, income and human value.

Is there something about all of this that can be measured? In what sense can we say that one person “has” more, or is embodying a new economy more than another? Not directly. The true currency of this economy is not a material thing. Its transactions cannot be registered in goods or services. Its growth cannot be directly measured against that of last year or last decade. What can be measured are the artifacts of its existence.

Those artifacts may not be obvious. But to those within a circle of authenticity and generosity, within a transformed economy embodying a new definition of wholeness, its parameters are obvious.