Sunflowers, bombs and the lotus in the mud
When we decide whether to build a dam, shouldn't salmon have the right to vote?
Systems theory helps us to visualize a political ecology where the agency of non-human entities weighs as much or more than human agency on the way our societies function. It is just obvious then, that our view of pluralism should extend to include all forms of non-human groups in the way we administer our living. Recognizing that not all forces are under our control, we should move to attribute decisional power to non-human actors, and incorporate their voices into the democratic process.
So, if – for example – we are considering the construction of a dam to generate electricity for increased human consumption, then the salmon migrating upstream to spawn, true to a cycle of life that has been repeating itself for thousands of years and allowed the human species to thrive in its bosom, should be allowed to express their opinion, even if for the time being – lacking better and more intuitional ways of interpretation and communication – their interest has to be represented by meticulous descriptions tabled on spreadsheets by specialized, sympathetic scientists.
The ecological perspective has finally brought us to the inescapable realization that our anthropocentric concept of society needs a methodical and comprehensive rethinking. Many of us are realizing that – following the previous example, just one among many possible – there is a compelling logic to the way in which salmon think about river flows. From this perspective, society is not just comprised of human people and their manufactured objects, net of infrastructures and rigidly categorized relations, but is rather a fluid, inter-relational web of associations involved in a synergetic dance, constantly evolving and negotiated among living entities that communicate in different languages. Human societies are but networks within networks living not as fixed structures, but as ongoing processes in which the dynamic interactions between ‘things’ are more immanent than the ‘things’ themselves.
There is an African proverb that says: “If you think you are too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito.”
This humorous and sobering thought should help to put things into perspective and not lose courage, even if the simple routine act of going through the daily news regurgitated by the mainstream media engenders a kaleidoscopic array of difficult feelings. You know that you need to decode messages, look deeper into the sources, unravel rhetorical acrobatics, make serious efforts at maintaining your equanimity and not give in to indignation or despair. Sometimes it makes you feel like a starved survivor lost in a thick jungle of lies, scrambling to find your way to the safety of reason again.
To engage purposefully with the complex, twisted world that Homo Sapiens has created, we seem to need a blueprint for love. We need a map for hope that gives us a clear sense of direction and the strength to walk the path with courage. But what other choices do you have? You can only be yourself, regardless of whether your path will lead to your hoped-for results in this material reality. You embody your values not because they will necessarily lead you to ‘success’ but because you believe they are right. And then you let your ripple travel through the pond, interact with other ripples, and resonate where it may.
After years, decades of witnessing the effects of the human assault on the biosphere, the Doomsday Clock getting closer and closer to midnight – pushed by the twin dangers of extinction by global nuclear war and ecological collapse – and the pathetic lack of serious efforts to reverse the situation, you begin to wonder whether at this point in history humanity’s death-wish has become stronger than its instinct of survival. Has Thanatos got the upper hand over Eros?
Climate change is not just a phenomenon that is happening to us. We caused it, but precisely because of that, it has the potential to open up a new way of thinking about how we see ourselves and how we operate in the world. The concept of separation implied in the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm of solid objects has been shattered by modern scientific understanding, and its reductionist philosophy of being is challenged, among other things, by the realization that human agency has caused the climate to change. Suddenly, ‘nature’ is no longer external, alien to us as we used to think. Suddenly, we cannot see ourselves anymore as the evolutionary peak splendidly isolated and sheltered within the ivory towers of our ‘culture’ while everything else – cows, salmon, seagulls, carrots, oaks, fungi, lithium, hurricanes, stars, rain, sunsets – is just an objective manifestation of forces of a lower order and value, a territory for our predatory instincts, a resource for our consumption.
Now we know that we are nature, and we need to choose whether to move together with it or against it. Of course, indigenous cultures throughout the world already knew this, but the white, western, colonizing culture that has come to devastate the world over the course of recent history, culminating in the rapacious ideology of neoliberal capitalism, has to confront this realization now.
Apparently, when a reporter asked Gandhi what he thought of western civilization, he replied “I think it would be a good idea”.
We have now the chance to respond to this new awareness. The gift of the Anthropocene is the opportunity to revisit the consciousness of our identity and our place in the cosmos, and to act accordingly, protecting the biosphere now and for future generations. It is not a negligible task.
We cannot think of the current challenges only in terms of costs or externalities in the context of a linear economic ‘development’ anymore. Prioritizing a radical shift in our investments and moving towards a way to manage our resources for the future happiness of the generations to come is now an urgent imperative. Both as a global society and as individuals we need to restrain radically our consumerism and redesign the whole complex of systemic relations that keep this self-validating, wretched cycle in continuous motion. Only in this endeavour, there is hope for a new kind of civilisation in which we set aside the delusion of human mastery and learn to incorporate in our living the languages of rivers, bison and hedgehogs, trees and bees because these are the languages that Gaia herself has been whispering ceaselessly in our ears.
Can we do that? The prevailing narrative of the selfish gene has been discredited. Those who still dogmatically proclaim ‘we know human beings, and human beings are inherently selfish’ in reality only know how human beings behave in the context of the unnatural conditions set up by capitalism, and before capitalism by the Judeo-Christian cultural tradition and its worldview.
A few days ago I was watching a film documentary on the Tham Luang cave rescue of 2018, when a group of young boys and their football coach were rescued in northern Thailand, after getting trapped in the cave system flooded by exceptional monsoon rain. The rescue, an international effort that lasted altogether 18 days, involved more than 10,000 people among rescue workers, divers, soldiers and scores of volunteers. Hundreds of local residents remained for the whole time and volunteered to cook, clean and support in every possible way the children’s families and the rescue teams at the camp set up by the cave mouth. Kids and teachers from local schools spent time there chanting and praying for the missing boys and donated money to help the boy’s parents with living costs.
The whole process was a remarkable example of international cooperation, and even if it could be argued that some of the various governmental agencies involved may have had other secondary agendas, there is no doubt that the people on the ground were moved by genuine solidarity and love.
We are capable of the most sublime acts of selflessness and the vilest acts of egotism, depending on what inner voice we decide to listen to. This is precisely why we need a system that fosters cooperation and not competition. This is precisely why we need to decolonize our minds from the beliefs that have brought us to the brink of the precipice and cultivate instead a culture of intentional mutual benefit.
The individualistic ideology underlying the current hegemonic system is rotten to the core, and it is revealing its true nature by the fruits that it is bearing: endless wars, global ecological destruction, constant fear and spiritual malaise. We need a new system that reflects in its institutions and relations the multiple layers of our identity, from the personal to the family sphere, to the community, to the planetary belonging, in seamless continuity and reciprocity; a system that carries in its genes the message that our value as individuals is inextricably tied with a sense of mutual responsibility and care; a system whose laws and institutions are infused with the awareness of our embedded interbeing with the whole of life.
Right now we are living in the final stages of what appears to be a momentous confrontation between two diametrically opposed visions of reality. The global corporations, from petrochemical conglomerates to pharmaceutical industries, to the military complex and arms manufacturers, to media monopolies, hold the power to undermine the process of change by blindly following their corporate imperatives while disseminating doubt and confusion through their well-paid pseudo-experts and PR campaigns that create ‘alternative realities’, self-convenient stories that many people still believe.
There seems to be a stratospheric distance between the people who are playing financial and war games in the hidden offices of power and the ‘everyday’ people who are struggling for their survival by going through their daily jobs and tasks; nevertheless, we all belong to the same species. There is an impressive array of behaviours which come from the same capabilities of the human mind and manifest along a spectrum of reactions to the stories that each one of us believes.
It seems that the balance of this epochal confrontation of narratives hangs on the battle to win the hearts and minds of the silent majority – all those who seem trapped on the hedonic treadmill of consumerism, buying into the prevalent sense of delusional normalcy, and currently don’t seem to be able to wake up from their consensus trance.
However, these are the facts: according to a new, recently published UN assessment, there is "no credible pathway" to keep the rise in global temperatures below the key threshold of 1.5C. The UN Report says that since COP26 last year, governments’ carbon-cutting plans have been "woefully inadequate". “Only an urgent system-wide transformation can avoid climate disaster”, the study says. This latest report shows how far off track nations are on cutting global warming, and says that we are heading for “climate catastrophe”. Current government climate policies leave the world on track to reach an average 2.8 degrees Celsius temperature rise this century. UNEP executive director Inger Andersen said: “We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster”.
And then, in another analysis which possibly shatters every realistic prospect of an easy and smooth ‘energy transition’, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute says: "There’s one other hurdle to addressing climate change that goes almost entirely unnoticed. Most cost estimates for the transition are in terms of money. What about the energy costs? It will take a tremendous amount of energy to mine materials; transport and transform them through industrial processes like smelting; turn them into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, vehicles, infrastructure, and industrial machinery; install all of the above, and do this at a sufficient scale to replace our current fossil-fuel-based industrial system. In the early stages of the process, this energy will have to come mostly from fossil fuels, since they supply about 83% of current global energy. The result will surely be a pulse of emissions; however, as far as I know, nobody has tried to calculate its magnitude."
Further along these lines, an article by James Martin elucidates the issue of how misleading the mainstream narrative around the ‘energy transition’ actually is.
The silent majority seems largely unaware of the patterns of deep enculturation that transmit worldviews and beliefs through the everyday discourse we hear from television and newspapers; or even more insidiously, of the messages embedded in the implicit assumptions and conventions that regulate our lives as citizens and consumers. These patterns are constantly reinforcing customs of normalcy, painting a rigidly controlled picture of what is proper, what is possible, and what we can expect.
Recently, a number of militant initiatives by Just Stop Oil activists in different countries have sparked an astonishing number of responses, from the sympathetic to the violently hostile.
When Just Stop Oil activists ‘attacked’ King Charles's Madame Tussauds waxwork with a chocolate cake before delivering a passionate speech on the need to act now, some of the comments on Twitter were “nothing is safe anymore from these crazy criminals”... “this is treason!”... “isn’t Charles a defender of the environment?”...
When other activists blocked roads in London, there were some extremely aggressive reactions from furious motorists who dragged them away and trashed their banners and belongings. The activists, who received non-violence training before engaging in any action, did not react and went back to their posts as soon as they could, before being later arrested by the police.
But what caused the most widespread outrage among the mainstream media and their public was probably the action when a can of soup was thrown at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (which, incidentally, didn’t suffer because the painting was protected by a soup-proof, bullet-proof screen, as the activists knew). “It is unacceptable to deface an immortal work of art for the sake of environmental protest” was one of the mildest comments. “Why don’t you go to interrupt a football match instead?”... “Why don’t you go to demonstrate in front of Parliament?”... Why don’t you go there? Why don’t you do this and that? and so on and so forth. There were actually some good suggestions for possible theatres of intervention, but in all suggestions, the operative word was “you”. It didn’t dawn on the self-righteous social media commentators’ minds that perhaps fighting for the preservation of our ecosystem is not a few crazy militants’ exclusive duty; that perhaps glueing themselves to a pavement, getting beaten, arrested, imprisoned, is not their pet hobby and entertainment.
I remember when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burnt a few years ago, the lyrical expressions of grief in the press, with lots of people and institutions contributing money for its reconstruction. But what about our burning planet? We seem to do a lot to preserve certain aspects of our past, certain mementoes of our presence on the planet as if they were an indispensable component of our identity. Perhaps great works of art are just that: testimonials of the noblest aspects of the human spirit. But what about preserving the possibility of our collective future and the future of the next generations?
As a species, we seem to have a propensity for building gigantic structures as a testimony of our presence and dominance over the natural world. Perhaps it is a desire to defeat the sense of impermanence, to escape the cycle of decay and rebirth: we identify with our constructs and separate from what we perceive as out of our control. We objectify nature and keep it at a distance because, to our egos, it is too terrifying to surrender to the consciousness of being part of it.
Then there are the people in power. One has to ask: on what planet do they live? I find it so difficult to relate to those who squarely put their intelligence on the side of ecocidal agendas: the active ‘climate wreckers’ as Antonio Guterres called them, and the politicians and legislators who facilitate them and shamelessly support the system they uphold. For Suella Braverman, the current British Interior Minister (British politics is so ridiculously fickle at the moment that I cannot guarantee she will still be a Minister at the moment of sharing this article), climate activists – “the Guardian-reading, tofu-munching wokerati” – are the main enemies of democracy. She and her Conservative Party are pushing through Parliament public order legislation that equates spontaneous environmental protest with domestic terrorism and tries to prevent manifestations of dissent before they even happen.
All this is happening under the eyes of the silent majority. Forgive me if a spontaneous association comes to mind, a comparison between the current normalcy delusion and the tacit acquiescence of the German people in the 1930s with the deportation of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals to the concentration camps... and their later shock and sense of guilt upon the full revelation of the atrocities and extermination policies perpetrated in their name by the Nazi regime.
What an incredible cognitive dissonance, what a lack of a sense of proportion: people get incensed over the perceived affront made to a painting of sunflowers protected behind a screen of plexiglass, but are not ready to give any active consideration to the state of our planet.
But this is what the infantilization of public opinion by the billionaires’ media has done. This is the only kind of participation that is expected by our current system: a perverted idea of democracy that only allows toothless ‘opinions’, powerless chit-chat, and voting every few years to choose the lesser evil within a system of power that legitimises exploitation, inequality, institutional discrimination and a suicidal course of economic choices that are bringing about the sixth mass extinction through the unsustainable use of land, water and energy.
This kind of pseudo-participation in the decisional process is contained within such a narrow spectrum of possibilities that it’s no surprise that many people’s votes can wildly and desperately swing from left to right at the drop of a hat because both are sides of the same blind and deceptive narrative. Even if people’s trust in the institutions is at an all-time low, they nevertheless see no alternative to the mega-machine.
In a time when the two doomsday scenarios of global war and environmental destruction are reinforcing each other – the energy and food crisis triggered by the conflict in Ukraine is the most recent, blatant example – the mainstream media has got us used to the obscene language of the warmongers. ‘Military effort’ is the euphemism for the preparation and execution of mass murder. ‘Dirty bombs’ seem to be different from other bombs, perhaps because a normal bomb kills more beautifully and neatly. ‘The mother of all bombs’ must be in the minds of its manufacturers such a magnificent, all-embracing artifact...
This twisted lexicon, which regularly makes the front pages of our newspapers, seems designed to suppress our sense of humanity. It’s the thunder of the meaningless, the noise of the show that keeps our awareness perpetually mesmerized on the surface of things, unable to see below the narrative of East and West, North and South, saints and sinners, when our human condition and our problems are the same, and they are planetary.
The militarization of consciences and the warlike language are dragging everyone into the maelstrom of the bipolarity of hatred, in which what matters is not to understand and plan for peace, harmony and stability, but to take sides and cheer. The ecocidal geopolitical power games played out between nations and ethnic or religious groups require that their side is engaged in a holy war while the other is the impersonification of evil itself. In the meanwhile, the oil corporations are registering record profits – the windfall of war – and there is very little public discussion on this.
If the system is designed to disempower our potential for agency and suppress our sense of togetherness, our natural duty must be about conscious resistance and rediscovering through active engagement that we are human and we flourish in mutual empathy.
Our focus must be on rebuilding everywhere the ingenuity for local self-organization that has been gradually dismantled by the rise of globalization, in a spirit of global solidarity and desire for natural modes of direct, participatory governance. The gauge of individual value must be the social usefulness of what we do and not the amount of power or money that we manage to accumulate.
We need to continue working towards the relocalization of our food and energy systems, and to expand participatory direct democracy to make every voice count in reality, not only in name.
The overwhelming power in the globalised world is the power of money, finance and business, and the way it is inscribed into the system, of which individual politicians and the like are just instruments.
The realization of the enormity of this tentacular system and the shortness of the time we have to operate significant change is undeniably a sobering thought, but history shows us that momentous change often happens in a non-linear way, when a set of actions and reactions put in motion a cascade of events and a shift in the collective consciousness that gives rise to epochal transformations in the way we live. The thought that our tiny contribution can have a resonance far greater than our expectations, and reverberate beyond our physical reach, should give us both hope and a stronger sense of responsibility.
Without mud, there is no lotus. Perhaps even oil can be a catalyst for wisdom.