Now what??

Back in the Eighties, Norman Myers, an eminent British environmental scientist, published the first Gaia Atlas of Planet Management, a richly informative compendium of maps, charts, and statistics from all over the world, illustrating diverse indicators of global ecological crisis everywhere on the planet, along with heroic efforts to imagine or design a better way to a sustainable future. Outside of James Lovelock's seminal work, this Gaia Atlas series (there were several others to follow) was one of the first widely distributed publications to use the name "Gaia" in designating our planet as viewed from an ecological perspective. I still vividly recall the concluding line from his introductory chapter that has stuck with me ever since:  "We have two choices: a Gaian Future--or No Future." I immediately adopted this as a slogan which I used repeatedly in my own essays, presentations, and publications, and which I would constantly repeat to my students.  By "a Gaian Future," I meant a future in which humanity recognizes its kinship with, and total dependence on, the rest of the biosphere.

At that time I had high hopes that such a Gaian future was just around the corner--that Lovelock's Gaia Theory marked a kind of evolutionary turning point in our collective consciousness, and that "Gaia" would soon become a household word, as all human institutions, starting with education, but moving on to commerce, journalism, politics, and even religion embraced the model and metaphor of Gaia and went on to encourage and subsidize political, technological, social, economic, and cultural innovations that reflected our awakening to our total collective dependence on the health of our unique living biosphere.

Suffice to say, I was wrong.  The Gaia concept was instantly ignored, ridiculed, and marginalized by the dominant culture--and especially the scientific community--and was embraced only by the scientifically illiterate and credulous "New Age" subculture, mostly in California--much to the dismay of its authors, Lovelock and Margulis, who were both serious, widely-respected scientists.  Christians condemned it outright as resurgent paganism.  Instead, mainstream commercial culture embraced the anodyne buzzword "sustainability," which they could manipulate easily in any self-serving way they desired, as in "a sustainable profit margin."  And "green" bccame an all-purpose advertising moniker for promoting slightly less destructive ways of doing business, as in "green laundromats."

But mention "Gaia" in polite company, and you would get little more than raised eyebrows--as if to say "but you don't look like a new-age hippie..."  Vanished utterly from public discourse is any shared understanding of "Gaia" as a serious, far-reaching scientific model to signify our understanding that (1) we are a part of, not apart from, the biosphere, and that (2) life itself has created, and continues to sustain, the thermal, atmospheric, and geochemical conditions that in turn sustain life. Yet the irony is, serious earth systems scientists have already embraced the Gaia model in its totality--they simply call it "earth systems science" and consign it to specialized graduate programs at major universities, well away from the public eye.

At the same time, Glomart--the relentlessly expansive, money-based, fossil fuel-driven Global Market Economy, run by multinational corporations pursuing the endless expansion of resource extraction, production, consumption, and waste, has gone on its merry way, plundering and polluting the planet, and sustaining itself by marketing the ethic of consumerism ("you are what you own"), brainwashing the public by constant advertising, and buying off the governments who would regulate them...

The net result, of course, is that this money-driven economy has become a terminal cancer on the Earth, for cancer can be defined as any subsystem that parasitizes and ultimately destroys its own biological support system. Because corporations know that environmental awareness is bad for business, their domination of consumer culture through mass media and advertising has caused any prospect of a Gaian future to disappear from public consciousness.  As fossil fuel-driven climate change reaches (or surpasses?) its tipping point, we are left facing the dire prospect of no future, or a future of self-accelerating social and ecological collapse so unspeakably horrible that no one in their right mind would want to inhabit it.

This leaves us with a quandary best epitomized by a book of essays I recently purchased, entitled We're Doomed. Now what? by Roy Scranton. The author (whom I recently met at a bookstore nearby, when he was on a promotional tour), is a fortyish English professor at Notre Dame and an Iraq War veteran, who is entirely convinced that our global civilization is about to collapse into unspeakable chaos and that there is nothing we can do about it.  His book is thus a kind of threnody for our civilization and for the planet as a whole. It is full of gloomy reflections on war, empire, popular culture, and the paradoxes of modern life, with our unprecedented affluence combined with abject despair about the future, but it is devoid of any hope or useful suggestions.

In contrast, Paul Gilding, an Australian environmental consultant and former CEO of Greenpeace, has written a book and presented a widely viewed TED talk entitled "The Earth is Full". The talk begins by making the compelling and unarguable case that our industrial civilization has already exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity, and that collapse is imminent, but his more optimistic take on it is based on an analogy with the period just before the outbreak of World War II, when the entire western world outside of Germany--Europe, North America, and Australia/New Zealand alike--was in deep denial about the threat posed by the rise of Nazi Germany. He recounts how once the catalytic event of Hitler's invasion of Poland occurred, followed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the entire industrial and economic infrastructure of Europe, America, and Australia shifted abruptly from denial into overdrive, converting almost overnight into a coordinated industrial war machine, to prepare for the now-inevitable global war with Hitler and Japan.

Gilding therefore believes that at some point, some cataclysm wrought by climate change will have the same effect on our global civilization as a whole, turbo-charging a conversion from fossil fuels to renewable resources, from rampant grown of production and consumption to recycling and frugality, and so forth.

I doubt it. For one thing, the analogy is wildly inaccurate. On the eve of World War II, we all faced a common enemy--the aggressive and brutal imperial fascism of Germany and Japan. And such an imminent, tangible threat makes it easy to mobilize public support behind a mass conversion to war preparation. Today, however, there is no comparable common enemy. We are our own enemy, in our assiduously reinforced greed, ignorance, and denial. And the threat is abstract--even when ice packs are melting, hurricanes are increasing, droughts and wildfires are rampant, fisheries are depleted, ecosystems collapse, animals and plants disappear forever, and environmental refugees swarm across distant landscapes, our daily lives, here in the comfortable, insulated middle class, go on much as usual, while our headlines focus mostly on Trump's latest outrageous tweets.

So between Scranton's gloomy hopelessness and Gilding's false last-ditch optimism, what's left?

Permaculture.

How so?

I have no real doubt that Glomart, our global industrial civilization, is doomed to incremental collapse into chaos, violence, starvation, and despair, and that the resulting damage to Gaia, our global biological support system, may take centuries, millennia, or possibly millions of years to heal, or to regenerate into a healthy, diverse biosphere. But we still have choices about how we cope with the coming collapse. Even if we can't hope for Gilding's fantasy of a civilization-wide awakening and mobilization, we can each, within our immediate domain of influence--our families, friends, and everyone else we can reach--practice and propagate the ethics, principles, and protocols of regenerative design, as we grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness.

The more people who embrace Permaculture design principles, and work together to implement them, the better off we will be when the s*** hits the fan. That much I know for sure.