Coming back to Earth

Good morning, friends.   This week, as you may know, is the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day.  It originated in 1970 as a great national and global awakening of environmental awareness--the awareness of the immense damage wrought by our industrial civilization on our life-sustaining planet. I was in college then, a junior at Ohio Wesleyan University, and like most of my peers, I was caught up in the enthusiasm of that moment, attending rallies, marching, watching the news.  We were full of hope that finally, our nation and world would commit--as we put it then--to "cleaning up the environment." How naive we were!

For a while, of course, the promise of Earth Day seemed to be coming to fruition, as our President--even a Republican like Nixon--established the Environmental Protection Agency, and our Congress passed landmark legislation like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and so forth. What we failed to recognize at the time, however, was that the monied interests in their corporate boardrooms quickly realized that environmental awareness is bad for business.  Despite the efforts of people like President Carter to encourage us to save energy, develop solar and wind, and curb our reckless consumerism for the sake of future generations, the captains of industry--especially the fossil fuel industry--galvanized Congress and the media to reverse course.

And so, a mere decade later, in 1980, that first era of progressive environmental legislation came to a grinding halt with the election of corporate backed Ronald Reagan, who immediately set to work encouraging greed and consumerism, and slashing funding for every environmental protection program he could find. With a few exceptions, under Clinton and Obama, it has been downhill ever since.  Earth Day has been reduced to little more than a sentimental children's holiday for celebrating pandas and recycling bottles. Meanwhile, the use of fossil fuels throughout the world continues to expand, wreaking havoc on our climate, while plastics choke our oceans, species disappear in record numbers, natural migration cycles are disrupted, wildfires rage across Australia and California, ice caps melt, fisheries are depleted, and our elected officials are so thoroughly bought out by corporate interests that legislation in the long-term public interest becomes all but impossible.

 I do not need to remind you that we are all facing an existential crisis these days; a time when both a medical and an economic cataclysm with no clear end in sight is now crashing down on us at accelerating rates throughout the world. This is especially the case in our country due to the abysmally bad leadership of Donald Trump.

So here we are. As an unstoppable virus ravages the world, the global industrial and commercial civilization whose abundant fruits we have all enjoyed throughout our lives is paralyzed and is on tenuous life-support. Both medically and economically, our future is uncertain, but we can be sure that it will never be the same again. As Shakespeare writes in King Lear, "The worst is not/So long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'"

For many years before this happened, I was well aware that our global market economy was doomed. There are many convergent reasons for this, but they all derive from one fact: an economy and civilization based on the endless expansion of commerce is fundamentally incompatible with a finite living planet. 

Glomart--my coinage for the Global Market Economy, or the order of money--is the world we made. Gaia--the order of nature--is the world that made us. To survive, we need both: Glomart provides our livelihood--the money we make, the food we eat, the goods we purchase. But Gaia provides the very foundation of our lives: the air we breathe, the topsoil that grows our food, the water we drink, and the diverse ecosystems that both sustain and enrich our lives.

The major premise of Glomart, of any system based on money, is that More is Always Better. This is assumed without question by every corporate board room on the planet, and promoted by every ad you see on television. It follows that nature has no value in this system until it is transformed into commodities: forests into board feet, mountains into quarries for minerals, prairies into monocultures, land into real estate, and so on.

Gaia--our living planet--is a complex adaptive system based on regenerative, ecological networks, where the guiding rule is the exact opposite: Enough is Enough. Too much or too little of any biological value is toxic to the system; if we get too hot or too cold, we die. If we get too fat or thin, we die. If our population outgrows its carrying capacity, we die. And if we trash the matrix of our lives--our lands, waters, air, and biodiversity--we also die.

So in effect, Glomart is a cancer on Gaia--a subsystem of our living Earth that is parasitizing its own biological support system, in order to keep growing and growing. So the collapse of Glomart is--or was--inevitable.

Still, this knowledge is small comfort in these early days of Glomart's inevitable collapse. So how do we cope? How can we turn this crisis into an opportunity?

My short answer, formulated long before this current disaster, is a simple slogan: Grow Gardens; Grow Community; Grow Awareness. 

To unpack this slogan a bit: 1. Grow Gardens. Our global agriculture and food distribution systems are under immense strain as a consequence of this pandemic, so it is essential that we localize our food system as quickly as possible. We can start today by planning to turn our lawns and ornamental beds into food growing areas. We can study and practice Permaculture methods to regenerate our topsoil with compost and mulch, turn our yard waste into hugelcultur mounds, and dig swales to retain water in the dry season. (I highly recommend GAIA'S GARDEN by the late Toby Hemenway as an excellent guide to backyard Permaculture.) Learning to garden with Permaculture methods will not only ensure and diversify our own food supply; it will also diversify our skills, provide healthier food, reduce our collective reliance on toxic fertilizers and pesticides, save energy and water, sequester carbon, and regenerate our topsoil. In short, growing gardens with Permaculture methods is good for us, good for our communities, and good for our planet. 2. Grow Community. In our Glomart consumer society, we are defined by our possessions: "to be is to buy." So we are constantly urged to go shopping at impersonal, big-box stores, and to enclose ourselves within privacy fences, but this has greatly eroded and attenuated any sense of community with our immediate neighbors. So we need to get to know our neighbors, whether they are "people like us" or not. It is often the people who are least like us that have the most to teach us. And this is especially true with gardening and other practical skills. Reaching out to our neighbors can be a challenge, but it is a challenge well worth pursuing, because in a traumatic crisis--e.g. the breakdown of the food supply system--the neighbor we know can be our best friend, while the neighbor we don't know can be our worst enemy.
But growing community goes well beyond the basic skills of getting to know, appreciate, and work with our neighbors. It also involves getting more actively engaged in our larger communities--including (and especially) UUCS, but also local nonprofit and charitable organizations, and our city and state governments. Glomart thrives when we are passive consumers, sitting in front of our televisions or driving our cars to Walmart. But we must instead relearn the art of active citizenship--of our neighborhoods, our city, our state, our nation, and our living planet. 3. Grow Awareness. This injunction infuses all the others. I do not mean trying to win others over to our political or religious views--that is utter folly, and will only make enemies. I do mean chatting with people casually in our neighborhood, whenever we see them, learning from them, teaching them useful skills, helping them when they need it, and engaging in collaborative creativity to solve collective problems and challenges.
So growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness are all intertwined. Each strengthens and encourages the other. The more gardens, the stronger communities, and the greater levels of awareness we have in our neighborhoods, the better off we will be, if and when the larger systems that sustain us start collapsing all around us. So let us practice the arts of resilience, of neighborliness, and of compassion, to help each other survive this global ordeal, and to build the foundations for a localized, resilient, and regenerative economy and a culture that knows itself to be a part of, and not apart from, the life of our sacred living planet. As Glomart crumbles, let a true Gaian culture rise like a phoenix from its ashes--starting in our own backyards.
Amen.