Post from Oct 17, 2020
If there is indeed a broad consensus that “we have broken the Holocene”, as I wrote last week, and that it is truly disastrous, how is it that we are not taking far-reaching steps to fix what we still can? The general assumption is that the main obstacle is the lack of technological solutions – if only we develop sufficiently efficient renewable energy, if only we develop machines to extract CO2 from the air and deposit it back deep in the ground, we can be saved.
The thing is, there is no shortage of solutions.
CO2-pumping machines already exist and work – for free. They are called plants and their technology is photosynthesis. If you look closely at the graphs of CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the years, you see that the increase is not smooth, but goes up and down every year, in a sawtooth pattern. Those fluctuations are the contribution of the deciduous forests in the northern hemisphere, a measurable and significant effect even with the diminished state of the forests today. What would follow from an intense worldwide effort to cover every possible centimeter with vegetation, especially with trees that have volume and not just area, even if we didn’t change anything else? If the danger is known, why don’t our large, mainstream insitutions seriously consider this solution, don’t investigate it, don’t consider that we might do better than acres of lawn and concrete, don’t even preserve the ancient trees that already exist?
There are many things that can be changed quite easily. It is known and empirically proven that the most effective way to change behavior is to make sure the desired behavior is the default. But the default, the available, the cheapest and simplest option in our society is almost always the non-ecological one. Almost every choice that benefits the cycles of life involves effort and cost by the individual – to recycle and compost instead of throwing away, to purchase food and products created with consideration for the environment, to repair things instead of buying new, to install air conditioners instead of building structures that maintain a comfortable temperature. Why?
The reason is not a lack of solutions or resources, and I argue that it is also not that humans are unable to deal with as big a problem as the climate crisis. But our society’s navigation and decision-making mechanism is broken. I don’t mean representative democracy, but rather the value system behind our collective choices. Our culture’s dominant worldview is capitalist. We were taught that this is the best and most effective system, that it brings peace and abundance, that the market harnesses our natural selfishness for the common good, that money is a neutral and necessary means of exchange, that development improves everyone’s life, and that if we just develop an “abundance consciousness” (individually, of course), we can summon whatever we want. It may not be smart to say up front that I reject this, but there it is.
Thanks to CityTree*, I read David Graeber and Charles Eisenstein, in addition to Marilyn Waring and others, and learned how our economy is not built on invention/creativity/entrepreneurship/resourcefulness/hard work as we are told, but on the principle of commercialization, of turning every “resource” in the public domain into a “product” in the private domain and from there into money accumulated by an ever smaller minority. These “resources” include land, trees, crops, medicine, software, houses, cars, attention, art, child and elder care, ideas, time, friendship, wisdom – everything.
Perhaps now, when it is clear that our very attention is commercialized, we can see that commercialization is our culture’s highest value, fed by appropriating ever more areas of life into the market. As long as we don’t dismantle and replace commercialization itself, we will continue to get the same results no matter what else we do. For that we need to understand what parts of the story that we were told are false. And we need to see truths that are usually hidden. For example, that trees know very well how to collect and remove carbon, or that it is possible to change which defaults we subsidize (because we subsidize all of them) to encourage environmental behavior on a large scale.
“But it’s too expensive” is the usual response, “How are we going to finance all this?” These questions follow the same cultural logic that leads us to make choices that destroy the living world rather than sustainable alternatives.It doesn’t actually matter whether these choices need to be funded or not.
I want to help dismantle the harmful logic that we as a society take for granted, and to show a much more benevolent, healthy, joyful, beautiful and life-giving possibility, both for us and for the world. Slowly and in Hebrew. Because wherever our beliefs and stories lead, there we will go.
In the wise words of Bayo Akomolafe, “Times are urgent. We must slow down.” Or in the words of the wonderful song from 1984, by Charles Murphy and Jami Sieber, “There are those who want to set fire to the world. We are in danger. There is only time to go slowly. There is no time not to love.”
*CityTree is an ecological community in Tel Aviv