Glasgow Post-Mortem

 “Don’t let it bring you down; it’s only castles burning/Just find someone who’s turning/And you will come around…” –Neil Young

To nobody’s surprise, the COP 26 Climate Conference in Glasgow, just ended, was largely an exercise in futility. After intensive negotiations and trade-offs, world leaders made the usual watered-down pledges to reduce carbon emissions and phase out deforestation, but these unenforceable pledges fall far short of what is necessary to avert global climate catastrophe by mid-century, or to give our children and grandchildren a future worth inheriting, rather than a hellish future we would not wish for our worst enemies. If the whole charade makes you feel despondent, you are not alone. At such times, I often recall the above refrain from Neil Young’s song, “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” from his 1970 album, aptly titled “After the Gold Rush,” which came out when I was in college. For that is exactly where we are these days—after the gold rush. This global “gold rush” was triggered by the discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels, starting in the late 18th Century, which provided a seemingly unlimited source of cheap net energy that drove the Industrial Revolution, and hence the unprecedented explosive growth of production and consumption of commodities, population, technological innovation, and affluence that has landed us exactly where we are today: a thriving global economy on a dying planet. For that growing production, consumption, and population depended entirely on plundering the planet for nonrenewable resources; transforming diverse, productive ecosystems into vast, sterile monocultures that exhausted the topsoil and drained aquifers while depending on external inputs of (fossil fuel-derived) chemical fertilizers and pesticides; paving over vast tracts of arable land with suburban sprawl to accommodate both exploding populations and rising affluence; and—throughout it all—burning vast and growing amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas, and emptying billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into our global atmosphere where they are now rapidly heating up and destabilizing our global climate, with catastrophic consequences for all of us. This is not a problem that can be solved from the top down. For those same global leaders at the Glasgow conference represent nations who are competing with one another to “grow” their economies in order to maintain the support and approval of their populations—and without cheap net energy, no such “growth” is possible. We often hear politicians promising to phase out fossil fuels by creating a “renewable energy infrastructure” based on solar, wind, or hydro power—in order to maintain “growth,” of course, so that everyone can keep getting richer, find jobs, build houses in the suburbs, buy new toys, and so forth. But such promises overlook one embarrassing fact: rebuilding the energy infrastructure, to be economically viable, requires a huge initial investment of cheap net energy to provide the raw materials, manufacturing facilities, transportation, and installations necessary for such a transition. And there is only one feasible source of this net energy: fossil fuels. (You cannot build windmills with wind energy, solar arrays with solar energy, nor dams with hydroelectric energy!) In short, we cannot expect those with an overwhelming vested interest in the industrial status quo of endless growth—political leaders or the energy corporations whose support they need—to agree to scale down the systems from which they derive their money and power, and on which their populations depend for their own livelihoods and aspirations. So if we cannot expect our political and commercial leaders to face reality and adapt accordingly, what can we do? The second line of Neil Young’s prophetic song gives us a clue: “Find someone who’s turning/And you will come around…” This simple advice has far-reaching implications. As Bill Mollison, the founder of the Permaculture movement, once said, "Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple." So what is this simple solution? What does it mean to “turn,” to “come around”? My answer to this is…embarrassingly simple as well: Grow Gardens; Grow Community; Grow Awareness. 1. Growing Gardens: The minute we start to grow our own food—even if it is just sprouts in a jar for salads—we have started to reduce our dependence on the vast fossil-fuel and money-based industrial and commercial infrastructure that is destroying the planet, the system for which I have coined the shorthand “Glomart” (for “Global Market Economy”). And as we gradually expand our backyard gardens, we learn more and more about the techniques of self-reliance and ecological stewardship. We save money (and energy) by recycling our food wastes into nutrient-rich compost, and we learn by doing as we rebuild our topsoil, so that rather than sending our “yard wastes” to the city dump, we can recycle them in place and return them to the soil as mulch. Small electric chipper-mulchers can help with this as well—or else, if we have the youth and the energy, we can simply chop and drop our “yard wastes” in the fall and return them directly to the garden. All such tasks and skills are easier if we use our garden time to strike up conversations with our neighbors, who may know things we don’t, and who may have tools we can borrow, rather than buy. And all of these reduce our dependence on Glomart, as we master and diversify the skills we need to grow, harvest, diversify, and preserve our own delicious, home-grown, organic fruits and vegetables. And through these chats with our neighbors and with passersby, we have taken the first step to… 2. Growing Community: Our industrial-commercial infrastructure—Glomart—has enabled us to lead far more isolated lives than ever before. Since we rely on that infrastructure—the electrical grid for communication and our gas-guzzling cars for transportation—to connect with friends near and far, most of us have not even bothered to get to know our neighbors. Yet this isolation has made us extremely vulnerable to power-outages and supply cut-offs due to (increasingly frequent) natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, wildfires, and ice storms—or larger socioeconomic crises such as supply-chain disruptions, economic downturns, or runaway inflation. All of these stresses can be alleviated by getting to know, and work with, our neighbors, as well as reconnecting with our faith communities and civic or philanthropic organizations. In all of these ways, we strengthen our collective resiliency in the face of our changing climate and other socioeconomic, political, and environmental stresses. And hence, through growing gardens and community alike, we are collectively 3. Growing Awareness: This process, likewise, starts in our gardens: becoming more keenly aware of seasonal weather patterns as they change from year to year. But also, we grow awareness by growing community—by working with our neighbors and others to address the challenges our community faces from the increasing fragility of larger systems, such as our civil order, our democratic institutions, our economy, and—of course—our planet. And conversely, our growing awareness helps us become better citizens and better gardeners as well! So in short, we can best “find someone who’s turning” by getting to know our neighbors and getting involved in community organizations, and we can best “come around” by becoming more locally self-reliant, by relocalizing our economy, and by learning, teaching, healing, and creating.