Tag: Anthropocene

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.

Transcending Madness at the End of the American Dream

There can be no real distinction between the geological phenomenon we’re promulgating and the broad socio-political drama unfolding daily. We have become the monster under our own bed.

I am compelled to mention the Anthropocene in the very first sentence of this little essay. It may not generate the most inspiring response, but it does crystallize the zeitgeist. This so-called era of peak hubris, of humans becoming a geological force, could perhaps be more accurately understood as earth giving birth to its own destroyer. There can be no real distinction between the geological phenomenon we’re promulgating and the broad socio-political drama unfolding daily. We have become the monster under our own bed. 

In a certain sector of Buddhist philosophy, there are six realms (or dominant states) of being. The most extreme is a destructive and insular consciousness called hell beings. Even more than the animal realm or the hungry ghosts, their actions are crude, tribal, instinctual and entitled, in extreme cases arising from a profound emotional poverty and driven by an unrelenting anger and perpetual thirst for validation and satisfaction. No effort—or capacity—exists to navigate a world full of threatening uncertainties and unknowns. 

Hell beings are most likely to be reactive and aggressive, most likely to resort to lies and violence if they cannot get their way. They will be offended and belligerent in the presence of symbols reminding them of what they most despise: generosity, patience, tolerance, mutual dependency and respect, any act of consideration for others except their own tribe. In the current case, they comfort themselves with a self-serving mix of spiritual materialism, ego, righteousness and religious dogma.

What we witnessed in Washington, DC on January 6 were hell beings driven not only by the drumbeat of the President’s lies, but also, let’s be honest, by a decades-long counterinsurgency against the New Deal, the middle class, organized labor, the flattening of the income curve and a tax system that rewarded labor instead of wealth. The counterinsurgency started with Reagan and has since driven a gradual starvation of government services, wage-stagnation, a massive upward transfer of wealth, the cynical global ‘race to the bottom,’ hollowing out the domestic industrial base, attacks on voting rights, regressive taxation, undermining the social safety net, attacks on labor unions, pensions and other benefits, the gig economy, attacks on public education and much more. Basically, the shredding of the American Dream: the neoliberal ‘austerity’ economy.

Before you assume I’m just finger-pointing and complaining about them from my lofty perch of meditative equipoise, let me say that those of us on this side of the issue ought to take a serious look in the mirror before we settle back into our cozy intellectual caves, because every realm of being in the Mahayana is equally delusional, just not all in the same way. It will take all of us to craft a viable future out of this fragile moment. No complacency allowed. No one can claim immunity to this cannibalistic virus. 

Those of us to the left of hell beings embody the sin of pride and a presumed higher (dismissive) calling. We are driven by our own sophisticated brand of confusion, a hunger for achievement and peak experience. Most of us have the good fortune of education, material security, employment and the prospect of a personally satisfying future, even within the general unraveling underway. But we are also blinded by our own narrow views, our own brand of madness: we may have escaped the forces eroding the living standard of the many, but we are directly culpable for taking advantage of it. We enjoy comforts derived from ecological devastation and economic oppression. Most of us are self-satisfied and just as prone to self-righteousness as the Christian soldiers marching off to war. 

So, let’s be clear. Despite the blanket of opportunistic lies exploiting and driving hell beings, those of us in the ‘reality-based’ community are driven by our own particular forms of short-sighted delusion which include blindness to our common condition with the hell beings. 

The counterinsurgency, recruiting from legions of disillusioned and dispossessed, is now inching toward its fascist apotheosis. While exploiting and unleashing America’s deep current of virulent racism, the oldest play in the fascist playbook, a post-truth politics has cleaved the nation. The most ardent followers live in a universe more of wishful thinking than fact. For them, values are whatever Trump/Mercer/Sinclair/Newsmax/Fox says they are. Permanent war is coming home. And for the plutocrats, race war is immensely preferable to class war.

For decades, we’ve been moving ever deeper into a polarized wasteland of conflicting values…or no values at all.  Covid-19 has been highlighting some of these issues, but in the US, the primary battleground pits federal aimlessness, incompetence and outright cruelty, driven by an ethical monoculture worshipping personal sovereignty without responsibility, willing to sacrifice the benefit of the many for the one, against an emerging ethical permaculture in which our relations derive from diverse ecologies, co-exist in nourishing mutuality, individual and social permeability and a deconstruction of divisive binaries. 

We are testing the proposition that authentic human development must include a commitment beyond the personal. And vice versa, government is the reciprocation of a collective commitment to unlocking and benefiting the potential of the one. By this measure, social, spiritual and economic development in America is stunted, even regressing. Inter-being and inter-beauty are our most worthy objectives. But for now, waking up from our own version of a destructive and self-defeating virus, we find ourselves locked in combat with those whose sole objective is to protect and enhance enclaves of personal and group sovereignty at the expense of the many…and the one. 

We’ve been flirting quite seriously for the past four years with the manufacture of consent for a domestic war. If we don’t confront and upset that narrative, redefine subjective and objective responsibility (restoring the rule of law) and demonstrate how personal and collective sovereignty can enhance each other, and quickly, not by rhetoric but by creative policy and organic initiatives at every scale, we most certainly will fall into a new and predictable barbarism. 

The Anthropocene: Humans Behaving Badly

Do humans have a purpose on earth? This is slightly different from asking a more open-ended, “What is the purpose of life?” or “Why are we here?” (in this universe). The question I’m asking, and hearing others ask, is more local, more pointed: “What is the human purpose on this earth…in this epoch of time?….in the matrix of life on this planet?” This is the question of the Anthropocene, because it’s clear we’ve (the white European cohort) become especially confused lately (since the Enlightenment?) and haven’t been doing it much good.

The answer to this question will of course be different depending on whom you talk to. But it’s clear, at least from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelations, our destiny has been to become stewards of life on earth. And since we’re talking about who defines the parameters of the dominant narrative, the Enlightenment confirmed that, pretty much, by declaring reality (Gaia) to be dead. Now, having crossed into the unfamiliar space of being the primary drivers of an unhealthy biosphere, why is our destiny not immediately clear?

We fancy ourselves exceptional. At what point in our intellectual or technical development did the formulation of “destiny” or “purpose” even become possible and if the question is sufficiently massaged to address the local inference, why did we not recognize this capacity long ago, elevated above all other personal or collective imperatives? It seems we are only beginning to address this question as our continuing existence is increasingly threatened.

A popular theme of science fiction—and Hollywood blockbusters–is ominous speculation about robots becoming conscious—that man-made machines will become self-aware and exceed the limits of human control—not knowing their place, so to speak. The theme of humans being capable of creating monsters is not new. But now we talk of AI growing beyond our control, its human designers squirming beyond all ethical boundaries and precipitating all manner of damage upon its collective creators. Yet, as most people have noticed, humanity has already brought the rising (acidifying) waters and become the dancing brooms in Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The Master’s messenger on earth has become the uncontrollable diabolical force of creation gone wrong with only one driving imperative—the preservation of a self-serving paradigm.

In other words, who is controlling what? Cloning vaguely falls into this category as well, creation itself falling victim to the law of unintended consequences. But we seem to have less moral ambiguity about cloning than AI. We already have the capacity to knowingly introduce bias into AI algorithms. The designation “ethical AI” itself infers the existence of “unethical” AI—which we would presumably and unequivocally reject….except “ethics” has now become a squishy concept because there’s so much money to be made. The creation of “ethical” AI now guarantees the future of the unethical variety.

I wonder if it occurs to the scientists that the train of civilization has already gone wildly off the rails?

So here’s the question that now haunts me. The sci-fi dystopian fantasies are all future oriented—as if, if we’re not careful, it can happen here. But we humans are already victims of our own development–driven by a relatively tiny cadre—a cult, if you will. We ourselves are already making the AI horror movie (and have been for a long time already), a world ruled by technology loosed upon the biosphere, wreaking havoc beyond the oversight of any cool-headed super-authority, not only being at war with the biosphere and with each other, while some of us also see what we’re doing, trying desperately to come to our senses to reverse the damage.

Not only does this view clarify the Anthropocene, humans ‘gone wrong,’ but begs the question of whether humanity—under control of the cult of growth—could ever be a neutral force. The naïve view is that somehow we have backed into a position of unprecedented influence on earth. In reality, the cult has been on a self-conscious accelerating destructive evolutionary tangent for some time; a product of natural evolution by some stretch of the imagination, perhaps, but one that now spells our own doom. Do they know what they are doing? Yes. And, as the definition of insanity so convincingly tells us, even in the face of rising danger the cult continues to believe doing more of the same will result in a different outcome. They are doubling down on the primacy of technology to manage our living relationship with nature—because money.

At what point did we stray off course? When did the progenitors of a culture of death become dominant? When did a tiny subset of humans turn to radical evil as a prime directive? When did we (they) become the proverbial robots gone rogue, incapable of thinking outside their own box? I’d say quite recently—maybe 100 years ago, accelerating in the aftermath of WWII, and the age of The Bomb.

But deeper conditions had to be present for this to be possible. As in the movies, a series of dysfunctional lines of code reinforce each other until an unpredictable tipping point is crossed and suddenly a new organism takes shape. In our case, it was a series of events over a long period. Mass production, the birth of capital finance, using money to make money (1300-1600), the creation of Limited Liability Corporations and colonialism all figure into the picture.

The Judeo-Christian fiction that humans were put here to dominate nature hasn’t helped,…and then there was that guy who said, “I think, therefore I am,” (17thC.) which segued into the ever popular, but so much more damaging, “I own, therefore I rule.” The inflection point occurring 70 years ago was an acceleration of the machinery of destruction to its current runaway status.

Along the way, while the rest of us were de-indigenizing, uprooting ourselves, enjoying newfound mobility, shifting our primary relationships away from tribe and earth to self and money, we lost contact with Home. Now, a small sliver of (distinctly white western) humanity has gained sufficient power and influence to write the rules of money and property to their own specifications, a radical evil self-interest, to rig the game in their favor. Mass psychosis has ensued. Now we have many gradations of psychosis gripping the general population, clinging to the illusions of equality of opportunity and upward mobility. Few make it, of course. The self-appointed engineers are an increasingly exclusive club.

Who is this cult? It’s the Barons of Wall Street, the CEOs of the biggest mutual, hedge and pension funds, the plutocrats, Washington politicians, the intelligence community (the National Security Apparatus), the core law enforcement agencies of government, the fossil fuel sector, the military-industrial complex and certain media entities. This is an insulated, exclusive, self-perpetuating, community of moneyed and political interests who determine the rules for everyone else. Their immunity to resistance is legendary, complete and becoming ever stronger. Whether any single individual member of the cult is insane may be debatable, but the ideology is seamless, ingrained, doesn’t require specific articulation or enforcement. It has become second nature to all its members. They make the kool-aid. We’re supposed to drink it!

The next (and worst) wrinkle of ‘bots gone wrong,’ is when they decide the rest of humanity is expendable (or even must be eliminated) because they are obviously of inferior intelligence and are screwing up everything for the radically evil select few who seek perpetual control and immortality from their secure and remote compounds in the mountains of New Zealand. In other words, every wave of resistance, every opposing dialectic generated from the masses who are waking up to how far we have strayed from the original mutually beneficial relationship to all life, who wish to restore the homeostatic mechanisms (emphasis on home) conducive to life, must be crushed—or at least delayed.

Surely there’s a name for the condition of this self-selected, connected tiny sliver of humanity dragging the rest of us off the cliff, an expression worthy of this mutation of the prime directives. Some prefer the term Deep State. I like the sound of Tyrannysaurus: the tyranny of a hell-bent cult whose days are numbered. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ll survive them. Like most mutations, the difference between the common and the rare and deranged is not radical. A few mangled lines of code are enough to set the result on a course of unchecked damage, tearing its way through the rest of the species leaving a trail of victims who will never fully recover. You know whom I mean, the uneducated, the poor, the dispossessed, the bankrupt, the disenfranchised.

The mentality of the Tyrannysaurus is separated from the rest of us only by a matter of degree. Not merely thinking for themselves, they think only of themselves. Not merely compartmentalizing the suffering of others, they are willing to directly cause that suffering by promoting a system of violence to extract every possible form of wealth from the commons. They do not merely avoid inconvenient facts, they construct alternate realities, attacking truth itself and fomenting mass delusion to support their fantasy about where responsibility lies for the ongoing wreckage. They do not merely believe humans are superior beings, but that they themselves are super-human. These aberrations of the Holocene, leading the way into the Anthropocene, believe they—and only they–are the pinnacle of evolution.

Most of all, and most damaging, they have managed to deny planetary limits to growth and the extent of our entanglement with other forms of life. Worse, they deny everyone else’s entanglement as well (because of course!), limiting our capacity to repair the damage their violence has wrought.

Long into the future, perhaps even millions of years, when the ice-bound or ashen chronicles of this age of humans is revealed and explored, the extinction story of humanity will be pieced together as an internally generated event. Unlike the first extinction of the great dinosaurs, human extinction will be a story pinned to the faulty code and resulting hubris, narcissism and unapologetic destructive force of the Tyrannysaurus forever, including the way they managed to convince so many of their contemporaries that only they had the answers to the rising danger of our uncontrolled self-destructive mass behavior and how they retreated to their secret guarded redoubts and watched billions of their cohorts, unprepared, succumb to starvation, conflict, disease and an uninhabitable climate.

The Path To Thriving I: Sustainability is Dead

For years the word sustainable held sufficient gravitas to alert us to advance a worthy objective: balance. As the increasingly terrifying news rises to and leaks over the bulwarks of denial and indifference, and despite political orchestrations and establishment media and especially the green washing of Wall Street’s “socially responsible investing”, that word has now become virtually meaningless. It is yet another casualty of the war on truth. It’s an empty slogan. What used to be there is now so muddled as to be unrecognizable.

With all the machinations of the expensive and increasingly sophisticated public relations campaigns bent on greening corporate images (see Black Rock just last week), appearances change while incremental concessions are seduced from the public. The airwaves and social media are infected by super-bugs of disinformation immune to the latest antibiotic push-back of truth. Whatever laurels ‘sustainable’ may have had to rest upon rapidly became linguistic deathbeds. Authentic dialogue must again be rescued from the merely opportunistic.

There is something missing from the conventional use of the term that no longer articulates the full flavor of what we imagine is the coming world. Maybe it’s our imagination that needs an overhaul. The world we want, slipping from our grasp, is something more like sustainability on steroids; not merely providing basic necessities or doing so without degrading life support system, but a world in which all people are living at an enhanced quality that can only emerge when we live in generous relationship and open possibility. Generosity is key. Unfortunately, the rising tide of bad news tends to corrode that option, making it even more urgent.

In the heart of spreading references to thriving is the ratcheting up of urgency that we feel in our bones and brains about the coming transition whose details are beginning to appear and the obstacles to which are emerging just as quickly. We want passion. We want to be touched by passion, moved by it. We want to feel that passion within our lives as a searing fire that will sustain us and burn through the old as we surf–and birth—a transformation into whatever is to come.

But let’s back up for a moment.

A simple operational definition of sustainability is that living systems meet all the needs of its members and don’t borrow (or steal) from the future. Without even checking any “official” definition, sustainability (simplistically) is a condition of using no more resources than can be fully regenerated in the harmonic course of natural process. But we are well past that point. The ecological account is overdrawn and collection is landing heavily at our front door.

This definition would apply regardless of the resource under consideration, from the material to the spiritual. The maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium, a systemic motility embodying a capacity to respond fully to natural forces, is to interpret inputs and modify behaviors appropriately to maintain systemic viability. Lots of attributes of sustainability have been devised and articulated. And surely it means different things to different people, depending on the scale of consideration.

There are the more popular, and also misunderstood, but easily explained practical economic attributes such as zero-growth—which is the primary reality disregarded by Wall Street, global investors, emerging economies and central banks. The dominant human social and economic paradigm of endless growth in a field of limited resources is clearly not sustainable. That’s why it must be disregarded. And, as many have adopted, we humans, having entered the Anthropocene, are on the verge of determining whether we are even capable of interpreting and responding appropriately to clear data that demands we modify our behavior to secure our own future viability. This, while losing a football field-sized chunk of pristine Brazilian Amazon rainforest every minute.

Yet the terms of that “sustainable” future are being redefined as we speak. The planetary system is adjusting according to its own laws, while the homeostasis we’ve depended upon for millennia is degrading. As we notice new and alarming components of the breakdown, such as insect loss, ocean acidification, desertification, the torrential runoff from Greenland being added to the known components such as radical weather, whatever we meant by sustainable a (lost) decade ago now has virtually no meaning at all.

To be bluntly specific, three features of the current paradigm (capitalism, patriarchy and empire) are unsustainable. The extractive industrial growth imperative regarding the earth as a limitless storehouse of resources as well as a waste dump; the dominance of the masculine principle in our social design, economic modeling, learning communities, workplaces and political discourse; and the economic and political class warfare driven by scarcity, fear, morphing into racial and ethnic conflict as we speak, have already conspired to bring many species to extinction and are now conspiring to bring humans themselves to a critical decision point.

Then there are the less widely understood social, political, and spiritual implications of sustainability. Regardless of the domain, however, at its heart, the term sustainable refers to a biological, energetic and social vitality, a structure/process that is perpetually and self-consciously adaptable enough—at sufficient speed–to recognize and address emerging needs, i.e. it is alive! It is dynamic. It changes easily and continuously. If anything is going to save us, it will be our ability to integrate, tolerate and respond to the actual pace of change.

We Are Failing

The Anthropocene is the label of choice for the success and the failure of humanity. Yet now, the signs of Nature withdrawing its endorsement of modernity are multiplying in frequency and diversity. She is fighting back against the totalitarian ideology of objectivity, which, ironically, we could say is something She created in the first place.

Linearity is disrupted. The plantation of Modernity is being liberated. We have not saved humanity from poverty or ignorance or inequality. We cannot Save the Planet from ourselves. We are not saviors at all. We are becoming fugitives, uprooted from our comfortable illusions of growth and permanence. We are now the dispossessed. We are the ones losing our home because we pursued the belief that we could have an objective home, some place that is “ours.” But no, our home is not a place. It is a state of mind. Culture is our home. Communion is our home.

Peter Block, a renowned consultant in organizational and community development, has said, “All transformation is linguistic.” The very idea that we view our selves and each other as objects, thereby separating our selves from the immediate, the entangled, the subjective, we become distinct from nature and view reality as dead. All of this renders true communion far more remote.

Making a simple linguistic shift from objects to subjects, we reimagine ourselves as perpetually evolving in imaginative and poetic ways, sharing an identical subjectivity with all others, human and non-human elements of the biosphere, which is itself a continuously emergent generative process without beginning or end. As subjects, we access an ego-less dimension of participating in the shared experience of co-creation, of the emerging meaning of our nature, bringing forth the aliveness in every moment.

“Nature” is not coming apart. We are coming apart. We are colonized by a totalitarian system of our own making, an inverted ideology in which we are conditioned to believe we are objective actors who have exercised our freedom, as it were, to act in our own interest, while our primary interest is obliterated by the colonizer. And, make no mistake, there is a colonizer. By believing in our objective status, we act against our own interest.

We are seeing the unraveling progress everywhere. The Enlightenment tells us—and we imagine—we are doing something ‘to’ nature. As is clear even to the most casual lay observer, by failing to acknowledge we are part of the very metabolism of the biosphere, in distorting and undermining our own sanctity, we are injuring our selves and the homeostasis of the whole. Thus, by failing, we arrive at a new ethic. But there is no arrival. Our failures will become seeds of something new. But we can never fully leave the failures behind and we will never fully arrive at success. We will always be in the middle.