Read Me

I just finished reading Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed. It's an amazing novel that has refined my thinking around how to live in balance with the earth and in nonviolent, communitarian communities. I urge you to take it out of your local library. I'm confident that when you've finished reading it you'll likely do so again or possibly, like myself, purchase a copy.

Here is a passage from the book:

"My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert . . . . We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do--they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species."

Upside?

I just finished a really good book about the coming collapse. I recommend that you check it out. And for those of you who question my reading lists of late you'll be happy to hear that the author is the Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. The book is The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon.

Homer-Dixon touches on the numerous ways that our modern industrial civilization is under threat. There's climate change of course, the coming energy scarcity, asymmetric warfare, overpopulation, and the growing gap between the rich and poor in states and between states. All these "tectonic stresses" threaten the highly complex yet fragile global civilization that we have created. There is little resiliency in the structures we have created and maintained.

Collapse is natural. It happens all the time in systems. It leads to innovation and change. For instance a forest fire (which humans stupidly prevent thereby making conditions ripe for a monster fire which nothing can stop) allows for new seeds and species to take over newly cleared niches thereby restarting and slowly increasing the complexity of the forest ecosystem which will then experience another creative collapse; do we need more convincing that linearity is unnatural? We've been putting off collapse for so long and pretending that we can continue to take and take forever (insanity?) that we're due for a monumental rebalancing. The longer we wait the more painful it will be; the forest fire will burn so hot it will kill all the seeds.

He is also very critical of the hollowness of modern industrial civilization with its focus on consumption: "Our economic role in this culture of consumerism is to be little more than walking appetites that serve the function of maintaining our economy's throughput. Our psychological state is comparable to that of drug addicts needing a fix: buying things doesn't really make us happy, except perhaps for a moment after the purchase. But we do it over and over anyway"(197).

Homer-Dixon ultimately believes that collapse is unavoidable. Sooner or later it's coming down. What we need, he suggests, is to be ready to rebuild lest the forces of intolerance and violence take over. While he offers a lot of potential scenarios he explains that we must be guided by new values (that are already becoming visible): "Our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on. They must implicitly recognize the laws of thermodynamics, energy's role in our survival, the dangers of certain kinds of connectivity, and the nonlinear behaviour of natural systems like the climate. The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life. Period. End of story. And a value system that makes endless growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us"(305).

What I liked most about this book was that it wasn't offering crazy solutions to our problems and pretending to be positive about the ingenuity of humans to subdue nature. It recognized that civilization is on a deadly and unsustainable path in its current form (can it ever be sustainable?) and has to collapse for the good of all life, including humans. It was also very accessible to those of us not familiar with panarchy for instance. It was also just plain interesting with examples from Homer-Dixon's Gore-like world traveling (are you part of the problem?).

There are so many books outlining that humanity is headed for disaster (Power Down, Collapse, Endgame, The Long Emergency, The World Without Us) but dear reader, if you want to start to learn the truth, start with The Upside of Down and then move on to Derrick Jensen.

And please if anyone tells you that humans will cope with the breakdown of the natural world at their hands tell them to go fuck themselves. We're fucked but that's a good thing.

Flowers for Civilization

I've taken to reading a serious work like Endgame, while simultaneously devouring a work of fiction like Flowers for Algernon. It lessens the shock of realization and revelation. In fact in this case I would argue that it complements Endgame quite nicely.

Endgame is about the problem of civilization, a recent theme of these digital pages, demonstrating its effect on me. Its compelling argument is that industrial civilization is a landslide that (certain?) humans have started. It is on a collision course with the valley below, or more clearly the entire planet. This landslide annihilates species, rips into the earth, pollutes the air and the cooks the planet and (certain?) humans assume that these actions are natural and normal. No species would ever destroy their landbase or the physical source of their being. We (all of us?) are something different. Superspecies doesn't quite cover it.

An interesting question, that I'm still wrestling with, is if this means that civilization must depart this earth (tall order) or if it can be reformed from withing (equally tall order)? Is civilization by its nature violent, abusive and exploitative? Does industrial civilization even fit within the natural rules that govern all life on earth?

Flowers for Algernon seems to me to mirror the story of civilization. It is the story of one man named Charlie's rapid development from a developmentally delayed person to a super genius and then his ultimate fall back to a simple mind. Preceding him is a super intelligent mouse named Algernon. According to Charlie: "He was the first of all the animals to stay smart so long and he said that Algernon is so smart he has to solve a problem with a lock that changes every time he goes in to eat so he has to lern something new to get his food."

Both undergo magical surgery to enable their genius. It seems to me that humanity is following this very same trajectory. We currently see our civilization as the peak of human history. As Charlie basks in the glow of his intelligence, he is told: "Just that you've come a long way kind of fast. You've got a superb mind now, intelligence that can't really be calculated, more knowledge absorbed by now than most people pick up in a long lifetime. But you you're lopsided. You know things. You see things. But you haven't developed understanding, or--I have to use the word--tolerance." Truer words were never spoken.

But as Charlie records and our civilization is starting to realize: "I may not have all the time I thought I had . . ."

Unfortunately the fall that we are now contemplating will be much more painful than anything that came before. And like Charlie, we can see the fall coming but unlike Charlie we are not powerless to act, though it might seem that way. Technology will not be the answer as technology has gotten us into this mess. Simplicity seems to me to be the answer, becoming smaller. This is not a stepping back from greatness as one might see with a cursory view of Charlie's fall, but the realization that we are not living in harmony with the earth. Simplicity does not mean living in caves it just means we have to follow the rules of creation.

Using his super intelligence, Charlie analyzes his situation and surmises that: "Artificially-induced intelligence deteriorates at a rate of time directly proportional to the quantity of the increase." Our rise too has been rapid, two centuries at best, though it started much earlier. Our fall, already sliding down that mountainside with the force of gravity, will surely be as fast if not faster. Olympus was never within our reach.

However unlike Charlie we have choices. Ecocide and humanity have rarely gone hand in hand until recently. Many peoples have obeyed the rules of creation and we could learn from them. They are still here as guides though civilization desperately attempts to embrace them with genocidal arms holding cola bottles and oil pipelines.

If we fail to reform or revolt or act in some way, we will truly become the cancer that afflicts our affluent lives. The malignant cancer that mindlessly swallows up life. Listen to the prophetic words of one of Charlie's dreams: "Upward, moving, like a leaf in an upcurrent of warm air. Speeding, the atoms of my body hurtling away from each other. I grow lighter, less dense, and larger . . . larger . . . exploding outward into the sun. I am an expanding universe swimming upward in a silent sea. Small at first, encompassing with my body, the room, the building, the city, the country, until I know that if I look down I will see my shadow blotting out the earth."