I will be on semi-retreat for much of the summer. So, expect only an occasional post until I return. It is time to withdraw from the fray, minimize my commitments, open a deeper space and wider perspective, return to square one: This is how I shall advance.
During this time, I will live without news, radio, TV, social media, and cell phone. I will listen to the wind and the grass—plus Shostakovitch and more Shostakovich. I will re-examine every assumption, direction, action and path. I will minimize all distractions and peripheral activity. I will open myself to ‘the measureless open’:
It is blindly, with no project, that those who dare all advance. Released from the spell of the fear of being without shelter. Holding nothing back, giving themselves up to the measureless open. . . . Saying ‘Yes’ unreservedly to the entirety of all that comes to pass.
For the very best introduction to the spirit and intent of Our Gallant Ship, read 1) the About page on this site, 2) the lengthy but impeccably rendered essay by Catherine Ingram entitled “Facing Extinction,” 3) the succinct but powerful TED talk by Greta Thunberg, 4) Dougald Hine’s essay,”After We Stop Pretending,” and 6) David Attenborough’s 57 minute (April 2019) BBC production: Climate Change: The Facts.
RecommendedExercise: Meditate on the following texts and then express the ideas that come to mind. Time limit: 3 hours.
“The answer to all questions underlying our problems today is the size factor—not unemployment, not warfare, not juvenile delinquency, not business fluctuations, not Black Mondays, Black Fridays, or Black Tuesdays. What matters is the enormous scale of these maladies. It’s huge! The world today is faced with the consequences of nuclear power, but the problems can be solved only by tackling the scale of it and the huge nations that need it, not by demonstrating against it. These huge nations cannot exist, poor creatures, without nuclear power, which is so efficient—so efficient that only 5% of the population is needed to contribute to the economic upkeep; all the rest must be tied to the bureaucracy or the military or the educational institutions that teach people to spend their time with no purpose. The fundamental effect is a vast increase in our human numbers; if there is to be a way out, these numbers must be reduced, and the way to reduce them is by reducing the size of nations, which at a smaller scale no longer depend on nuclear power but instead on muscle power, small electric power, wind power, and so forth.” — Leopold Kohr
“Kohr’s claim was that society’s problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organization, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called “the human scale”: a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because “the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself”.”
.
. .
“Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for “whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions”. Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.”
The root of our problems with the environment comes from a lack of constraint on the growth of population. There is no single right number of people that we can have as a goal: the number varies with our way of life on the planet and the state of its health. It has varied naturally from a few million when we were hunters and gatherers to a fraction of a billion as simple farmers’ but now it has grown to over six billion, which is wholly unsustainable in the present state of Gaia, even if we had the will and the ability to cut back. (ed. This was written in 2006, the population in 2019 is about 7.4 billion; and the forecast for 2050 is about 9.5 billion)
.
. .
“Personally I think we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion, and then we would be free to live in many different ways without harming Gaia.”
Again: Meditate on the texts and then express the ideas that come to mind. Time limit: 3 hours.
_________________
Leopold Kohr (1909-1994) was an openhearted, urbane, convivial man who loved intellectual companionship and discussion. He was an economist, jurist, political scientist, and self-described philosophical anarchist. Believing in the effectiveness of returning to the local level to solve the problems affecting humankind, he saw small self-governing communities as best able to solve their problems with their own resources. Read more . . .
Paul Kingsnorth – I am 75% English, 25% Greek Cypriot, 100% European and 0% European Union. I share 96% of my genetic material with chimpanzees and 60% with bananas. I am descended from the Viking Earls of the Orkney Isles. I live with my English-Punjabi wife and our two children in the west of Ireland, where 85% of the men are descended from eastern Mediterranean farmers. I’m
a writer. I mainly write novels, poetry and essays. Read
more . . .
James Lovelock – James Ephraim Lovelock, CH CBE FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, environmentalist, and futurist who lives in Dorset, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system. Read more . . .
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand: They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living And all that we wish for our friends: but existence is believing We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.
– Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), May 1939, originally published in Another Time (1940), excerpted from Collected Poems: W. H. Auden
For anyone interested in getting their local city council to declare a climate emergency, this is a good place to start. I will provide further resources over the next few days.
This post is by Deb Joffe, co-founder of Swindon Climate Action Network. She co-runs The Climate Brief, promoting climate change action among local politicians.
Local councillors from all parties have a strong appetite for discussion and action on climate change, but need to feel that the public support them, according to recent research. They also want reliable information about solutions they can implement.
What
happens to hope when our chances of avoiding catastrophe fall away,
and we begin to see there is no way out of the present climate
crisis, no matter how many lights we turn off, no matter how many
wind turbines we install? How does hope change as the earth’s climate
becomes less and less hospitable and less and less controllable?
Project us forward to the year 2030, when we will probably know for
certain that the catastrophe is full upon us. What will our hope look
like then?
In a haunting and beautifully written contribution to Dark Mountain, Issue #15, Ingrid M. Rieser discusses the work of researcher Vanessa Andreotti who says there are at least three paths open to us “if we decide the current system is not ‘fixable.’
First, we might try “hacking the system – using the system’s resources to create something which undermines or defies logic. But when attempting to play the system, you always run the risk of being played instead.” Second, we might “leave altogether and try to set up a new, separate alternative, simply walking out (think eco-villages). But in both cases, she says, “you will risk ‘reproducing modernity’s violence’. Inadvertently bringing with you the very evils you hoped to escape.” Put in Buddhist terms: “no matter where you go, there you are.” Our old habits, character traits, and personal problems will tag along with us. Though we may change our residence ninety-nine times, our inveterate tendencies and unwholesome mental formations will remain—warm as toast, and tight as a drum.
But,
according to Andreotti,
there is a third path – that of hospicing. Rieser
says that we think of hospicing “as caring for the dying, and that
is exactly how Andreotti
and her colleagues intend it.” They see this kind of hospicing as:
“sitting with a system in decline, learning from its history,
offering palliative care, seeing oneself in that which is dying,
attending to the integrity of the process, dealing with tantrums,
incontinence, anger and hopelessness, ‘cleaning up’, and clearing the
space for something new. This is unlikely to be a glamorous process;
it will entail may frustrations, an uncertain timeline, and
unforeseeable outcomes without guarantees.”
For many of us, hospicing will be an essential, perhaps primary, component of our response to the present climate and environmental crisis. And, the crucial first step in the process is to tell the truth. For the greatest gift one can give a dying person is to gently take their hand, look them straight in the eye, and, with radical tenderness and great compassion, say to them ‘Dear friend, you are dying.’ This is what a friend should do. One must not lie to them. One must not pretend it isn’t so. One must not give them false hopes. For hope can be an obstacle, it can allow us to persist in our present way of life entirely immersed in a soothing bath of wishful thinking and self-deception, blunting the immediacy and urgency of what lies at hand.
Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war, But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.
“In recent weeks, the environment has risen to the top of the political agenda and the truth is beginning to be spoken. This has culminated in the UK Parliament declaring an Environment and Climate Emergency – two days after Scotland and Wales.”
“However, too much of the focus has been on greenhouse gases and climate change. We also face an ecological crisis – the sixth mass extinction – which is as dangerous for our planet as climate change. The UN IPBES report on biodiversity released on Monday shows that our way of life is causing nature to collapse.”
“The UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report is the most damning of its kind and reveals our consistent and extensive failures to address the accelerating loss of biodiversity. It is both shaming and shocking. Little or no progress has been made towards halting extinctions, loss of habitat or restoration of ecosystems, within safe ecological limits or sustainable production and consumption.
Dr Alison Green, National Director (UK) Scientists Warning and spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion
“The report delivers a stark message that humanity is engaged in the mass annihilation of other species with whom we share our home.” Read more . . .
This post is by Deb Joffe, co-founder of Swindon Climate Action Network. She co-runs 