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.

Black Swan: Thoughts on the Pandemic

"Black Swan" is a metaphor introduced to me by my friend Mark. According to Wikipedia and other sources, it refers to 

"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology, 

coupled with "[t]he psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs."

With the recent emergence and rapid proliferation of the COVID-19 ("Coronavirus") pandemic, a true Black Swan has landed, right at our doorsteps. An entirely new strain of severe respiratory virus is engulfing our entire planet. It has a high death rate, no vaccine, far too few adequate testing instruments, a slow (and often invisible) incubation, and exponential transmission through respiration, and it is threatening shortly to overwhelm our hospitals and medical facilities, crash our economy, and plunge us into unimaginable chaos within the next few months. Yet our poisonously incompetent and corrupt so-called "president" and his morally bankrupt cronies are in complete denial about this, have slashed funding for research into preventive measures, and are concerned only about the stock market and about putting on a good face for the next election.  We have no leadership, and hence are on our own, facing what may well be the most catastrophic global public health crisis ever.  (For reliable information on all of this, check out Chris Martenson on https://www.peakprosperity.com/.)

When faced with such a global catastrophe, especially one where enforced isolation ("Social distance" is the term du jour) is the only known way to slow the exponential spread of this entirely new strain of respiratory virus (for which there is no immunity and no known vaccine), most of us (who are  not still in denial) are dealing with varying levels of panic, justifiably so.  This could be IT--the collapse of the globalized, industrialized, market-based world we have always known into utterly unpredictable chaos, starvation, violence, and mass die-off--starting with the elderly (that is, me and my wife, among others) who are most susceptible. (We may count ourselves lucky to die first, in fact!)

From a Gaian perspective, this virus could be nature's way of ridding the biosphere of a cancerous subsystem--agro-industrial humanity--which directly threatens its future viability. After all, "blooms"--the rapid expansion and subsequent collapse of algae or other organisms when a temporary new energy source becomes available--are a commonplace occurrence in nature. For many species, such boom-and-bust cycles are commonplace, when a population expands beyond the limit of its carrying capacity, and viruses may thus be part of a complex Gaian regulatory apparatus for dealing with pathogens like ourselves.  But this awareness, needless to say, does not do much to quell our current dread and anxiety.

What does?  Here I would begin with an often-quoted proverb coined by Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture, who had a deep, intuitive understanding of the way of nature, as it applies to our own necessary agenda (i.e. staying alive and building healthy human habitats that are symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, our biological support system).   And that proverb is "The problem is the solution."

At first glance, this may seem like a trite, almost frivolous cliche, given the gravity of our current situation, but when contemplated more carefully, it reflects an insight of great depth and resonance.  Our problem today, in a nutshell, is not only the virus itself, but also, the essential response to it that virtually everyone is practicing: cancelling every public event and retreating into isolation.  But that isolation--that "self-quarantine"--carries its own set of problems: when we are out of touch with each other, we fall prey to all of our inner demons at once--panic, depression, fear, short tempers, dread...

And this in turn can lead to larger pathologies of alienation--fear and mistrust of others, hoarding, stealing, rumor-mongering, etc.  How could there be any "solution" in such a "problem"?

Throughout history, in every wisdom tradition on the planet, those who reached the highest levels of insight and compassion were those who went into long periods of isolation, to facilitate soul-searching and/or inner development (call it what you will...)  Think, for example, of the ancient Hebrew prophets, Jesus confronting his demons in the desert, the Buddha abandoning his princely life to wander the world in search of enlightenment, Mohammed going out into the cave to encounter Allah...these stories are all variations on the same theme: isolation gives us the opportunity, if we choose to take it, for the kind of inner development that can spawn whole new cultures, new ways of looking at life.  So in this respect, our current, agonizing isolation may be a blessing in disguise--if we choose to accept it.

How so?

Each of us, of course, must answer this for ourselves, based on our own preferred spiritual practice. But here are a few tentative suggestions:

For Christians, Jews, Muslims, and all other monotheistic faith traditions, prayer is the thing. As the grandmother of one of my students once told her: "You can either worry or you can pray. You can't do both."  And prayer is definitely preferable to worry.  I can't claim to be an expert on prayer, since my own inclinations have lead me to embrace Buddhist practice (i.e. meditation) but I'm quite convinced that the two disciplines--meditation and prayer--are not all that different. They are really two different ideological frameworks for achieving the same goal--inner peace, equanimity, and compassion.  All of which are desperately needed these days.  For Christians, a good prayer to start with is the centerpiece of the Prayer of Jesus--"Thy will be done." Either that or the Gesthemane prayer--"Lord, please take this cup from me--not as I will, but as Thou wilt."

For Buddhists and other practitioners of Dharmic religions, or others attracted to these Eastern wisdom traditions, there are myriad meditative techniques to choose from. So I wish to share my own. It is compatible with any belief system--or none at all.  It goes like this:

1. Allot yourself time for 30 deep breaths--about 10-15 minutes will do. (The deep breaths, incidentally, will help your lungs stay healthy--which might be important these days to fend off the virus!)

2. For the first 10 breaths, in and out, focus consecutively on contemplating the value, to yourself and others, of each of the following verb phrases:

(a)  Breathe...Observe...Let Go

(b)  Be well...Do good work...Keep in touch...(with gratitude to Garrison Keillor, who coined these).

(c)  Learn...Teach...Heal...Create...

3.  Repeat these 10 phrases a second time, this time focusing on practicing them as you are doing so. In other words, look upon the words as "windows" describing what you are actually doing at that moment. Try turning them into gerunds if it helps (i.e. "Breathing, Observing, Letting go...") to keep yourself in the present moment.

4. If you can do so authentically, try repeating the 10 phrases a third time, this time vowing to stay with this practice regularly. Renew your vow every time you practice it, until it becomes habitual.

("I vow to breathe...to observe...to let go...")

5. At any time, once you are centered. you can simply drop the words and focus on your in and outbreath all by themselves, for as long as you wish. It might also help to start with a poem or invocation, and end with a blessing, such as "May all living beings benefit from this practice." But that, of course, is entirely up to you.

It might also help to keep a journal, in which you jot down your own thoughts about what each of these verb phrases means to you personally. This practice can be combined, as you wish, with any other contemplative or meditative practice that you already use, in any faith tradition.

I hope and pray that this inner work in solitude helps you maintain a measure of equanimity and compassion in this time of crisis, so that you can be an agent of global healing thereafter, as we return to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.

Our last, best hope

January 5, 2020

Like most thinking people on the planet, I have a heavy heart this evening. Ever since our deranged, maniacal "president" impulsively ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran's top general and second in command, our fragile global political order has been coming unglued, plunging ever-more rapidly downward toward the unthinkable cataclysm we have all feared for my entire life--"World War 3." As Thomas Paine once wisely said,

"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."

So it was when George W. Bush launched unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; so it was when Hitler bombed Poland, when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist, when Napoleon invaded Russia, and so forth, through all the annals of history. But the (now apparently inevitable) war with Iran may spiral rapidly into a conflagration that will dwarf all these past horrors, especially if, in the acceleration of hostilities, Trump yields to his long-time fantasies of unleashing our vast nuclear arsenal, drawing Russia, North Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and likely India and Pakistan as well, into the general, apocalyptic melee.

Behind the scenes of all this political madness and folly, of course, is the ever-accelerating pace of climate change--or more precisely, climate catastrophe, which has already engulfed nearly all of Australia in vast, uncontrollable wildfires, while unleashing unprecedented heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods all over the globe, along with melting ice caps, sea-level rise, ecological collapse on both land and sea. This could be it: the end of history; the end of humanity; the end of life on Earth as we know it.

So where is this "last, best hope" I refer to? Is it not somewhat of a bad joke, at this juncture, to even mention the word "hope?" At a macro-scale, probably so. I have little doubt that our money-and-fossil-fuel-based global industrial world order is doomed, inevitably, to collapse, whether rapidly or incrementally, into chaos and horror and mass die-off, which will probably take most of humanity and the rest of life as we know it along with it. (The extinction may well be total--in which case, obviously, there is no hope at all for us.)

But I still hold out some hope, nevertheless.
Why, you ask.
My short answer? Permaculture.

How so?

As one wag (I forget who) once put it, "Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening."

So what exactly is Permaculture?

It is a method of gardening, but more than a method of gardening.
It is a method of landscape design, but more than a method of landscape design.
It is a systems-based approach to the design of healthy ecosystems that include humans.
But it is even more than that: It is a way of thinking, an ethical way of living, and a way of interacting with each other and our living world, our local (and global) habitat, that includes all of the above.

In short, it is the seed of a new global culture, a Gaian culture, that has already taken root around the world, and may rise like a phoenix from the ashes of our current dying industrial civilization. It knows no boundaries; it embraces and nurtures the entire planet (human and nonhuman alike); and it is not daunted by any challenges at all, but flourishes in every conceivable habitat, from deserts to rainforests, from equator to polar regions, from back yards to farms to cities to whole communities and cultures--even distressed communities like refugee camps.

And above all, it is resilient enough to survive apocalypse: as long as there are humans living together and trying to cope with adversity, permaculture can take root. And since its basic principles are common to all living beings, it can even survive the extinction of humanity itself--for all living beings follow the 12 principles: they observe and interact;  they catch and store energy; obtain a yield, apply self-regulation and accept feedback, use and value renewable resources and services, produce no waste, design from pattern to details (if you don't believe this, watch a spider build a web!); integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal; and creatively use and respond to change.

And so by learning and teaching Permaculture, no matter what happens, we say YES to life itself.

I will end, as always, by sharing my Dharma Gaia mantra--a guided meditation I have formulated that helps me whenever I feel overwhelmed by grief and despair for our planet, people, and other living beings. On ten consecutive slow breaths, repeat (aloud or to yourself) each of the following verb phrases. For a longer meditation, you can try doing so three times in a row: first to contemplate them, then to practice them (in the present moment), finally to vow to adhere to them as long as you live and breathe, renewing that vow whenever necessary. The mantra is divided into three parts:

1. Reclaiming the Moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go.
2. Setting a Day's Agenda: Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch. [with gratitude to Garrison Keillor]
3. Revisiting your life agenda: Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create

Finally, remember the Permaculture slogan I have devised as well:

Grow gardens; Grow community; Grow awareness.

The Little Ones

Although I have no children of my own, I  heard this morning that my niece, Lillian, has just given birth to a little boy, whom she has named Charlie--a name of long lineage in my family, since it is also the name of my brother, father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather. So that makes a total of six grandbabies in my family: Rafi, age 7; David and Elsie, age 2 (or so)--all three children of my brother's eldest daughter Teresa; Lila and Amelia, the two baby daughters of Vickie (Teresa's younger sister); and now, newborn Charlie--my sister's first grandchild.

New births, new generations of one's family, are and always have been a cause for joy and celebration, and I would be a grinch indeed if I were to do anything other than share in the joy of my siblings, nieces, and grand-nieces and nephews.  But inevitably, the dark question arises: What kind of world are we leaving to them?  How long before the accelerating ravages of climate disruption trigger a cascading series of catastrophes, both natural and social,  that transforms their lovely world into a hellish landscape of chaos, violence, grief, madness, and starvation from which there is no possible escape? And is there anything we still can do to avert or even mitigate this catastrophic dark cloud over my descendants' future?

At a global scale, probably not. We had a chance, 30-40 years ago, when the reality of climate disruption due to rising CO2 levels first became widely known to the public. But due to concerted strategies of denial by the Fossil Fuel industry (spearheaded by Exxon) and parroted by Republican politicians, coupled with almost total neglect by both political parties and the pervasive, corporate-owned mass media, we have done next to nothing to curb our carbon emissions worldwide; in fact, recent figures have shown that we have pumped more carbon into the atmosphere since 1985 than we did during the entire preceding history of the industrial revolution since about 1800. This has been a catastrophic collective failure of will.

We all know why, of course. The entire Industrial Revolution, bringing with it a previously unimaginable growth in affluence, in population, and in technological innovation, arose entirely due to the sudden infusion of seemingly endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--that powered it.  Net energy, after all, is the foundation of any economy, and the vast amount of easily accessible and transportable net energy made available by fossil fuels drove the industrial revolution and spread it around the world, all within a mere 200 years--a geological eyeblink.

No one even imagined that there was a downside to this explosion of affluence and innovation until atmospheric sensors in Hawaii started recording rising levels of global CO2, around 1956.  (That was within my lifetime.) Subsequent years, of course, have solidly reinforced the conclusion that this rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 is entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels worldwide. Yet we are so addicted to fossil fuels--and the vast amounts of money they earn for investors--that we suppressed and denied this information until only recently, when the catastrophic effects of this rising concentration of CO2 became more and more obvious: melting polar icecaps, die-off of coral reefs worldwide, record hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, collapse of ecosystems and disappearance of species, and so forth. No thinking person (a category that excludes most Republicans, unfortunately) can any longer deny what is happening to our planet and why.

So why are people still having babies?  It's obvious--we are animals, and that is what we do.  And giving birth is the peak defining experience of femininity.  So I cannot and will not judge anyone for doing what comes naturally. But I am relieved that I never had any children of my own. It has spared me the personal dread and anxiety which will increasingly preoccupy the lives of my nieces and nephew as they raise their children and attempt to give them hope for their future. That hope will increasingly become elusive, at best, for the climate catastrophe will spare no one--not even the super-rich.

So here is my message for my grandnieces and grandnephews--a message I will never actually show them:

Dearest Rafi, Elsie, David, Lila, Amelia, and Charlie--

We love you all, but we have left you a broken, dying world. We have no excuses--we knew about what was happening 40 years ago, but we did nothing to curb our total addiction to fossil fuels. Addictions are hard to break--especially one that is the very basis of the increasing affluence that we enjoyed and took for granted all our lives, and that you still enjoy today. But not for long.

So here is what I suggest:

1. Let go of false hopes.  The future you inherit will be nothing like the present, and even less like the glorious techno-future that the mass media will continue to promote, in the teeth of growing evidence to the contrary.
2. Don't despair--your future will be hard and bitter, but this can be mitigated if you start now with the following suggestions.
3. Learn how to grow your own vegetable gardens starting now, using permaculture methods that minimize and even eliminate external inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and imported topsoil, and that adapt to changing climates through diversity. This way you will be able to feed yourself and others good, nutritious food after corporate agribusiness collapses.
4. At the same time, grow community: make lots of friends, and nurture those friendships by taking care of everyone, and abandoning no one. As your community expands, get involved in learning new skills, teaching them to others, healing each others' anxieties and illnesses, and creating innovative solutions to problems that arise.
5. Finally, grow awareness. Learn to think critically, so you can transform hostility into a teachable moment by calmly asking people two questions:a) What do you mean by ________(a word they just used--even an insult)? and b) Why should I believe what you say about it? (What is your evidence, and where did you get it?)  These questions, skillfully employed, can turn a fight into a dialogue.
6. Learn to meditate--Breathe, Observe, Let Go--whenever you find yourself afflicted by rage, anxiety, or craving.

And keep your eyes focused on a noble purpose for being alive--to cultivate the resilience, courage, and determination to create a new civilization that is symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, our biological support system. That new, post-industrial, Earth-friendly civilization starts from the ground up (quite literally, by building good topsoil)--not from the top down (by following demagogic leaders). Keep on trying--never give up--no matter what happens. And even if we all fail--even if our living planet goes into a runaway feedback loop that renders it uninhabitable, we will all die, but you will die in peace, comfortable with the inexorable reality of impermanence, just as you lived.

Blessings,

Uncle Tom

Beyond Money: A new way of imagining "capital."

The word "capital" has normally been taken to refer to available money, or--more precisely, "Wealth in the form of money or assets, taken as a sign of the financial strength of an individual, organization, or nation, and assumed to be available for development or investment." (from the Business Dictionary)

 By this common definition, capital is inherently rooted in our global market economy, which I call "glomart" for short. But that money-based economy is completely incompatible with Gaia, our biological support system, since it depends on the infinite growth of production and consumption of commodities--which is impossible on a finite planet.  Money itself is just arithmetic, after all--an abstract transform of information about the marginal value of commodities. Hence, without commodities, you cannot have money--and without money, you cannot have commodities. In order to have a "commodity" you need to put a (physical or abstract) boundary around something in order to sell it on a market.

But such boundaries inevitably isolate that entity from its context, and all of the relationships that sustain it, and that it, in turn, sustains.  This is why, historically, we decided that human beings could not be commodities.  The Civil War marks our nation's final decision on this matter--the point at which we recognized, legally, that a person's autonomous rights as a human being supersede his or her commodity value to a plantation owner.  Likewise, the National Park System arose in recognition that certain places had too much intrinsic (non-monetary) value to our culture to be reduced to commodities for the market. When something is too sacred to be traded, it is no longer a commodity; no longer a form of "capital" in the usual sense of the word.

But there is a big problem with this "usual sense of the word." The sole object of any business enterprise is to increase its store of capital--of money and/or the commodities that can be traded for money. And money--or capital--is a zero sum game: if one person has it, the other does not. So the object of business--of Glomart--throughout the world is to build their capital base by transforming nature into commodities as rapidly as possible: land into real estate; diverse and fertile prairies into monocultural farms; forests into board-feet; potentially valuable minerals into mined and manufactured goods; oceans into fisheries and fisheries into fishmarkets and restaurants; fossil fuels into cheap energy resources that power all of the above. The net consequence, of course, is the ongoing destruction of our biological support system, coupled with the commodification of everything--and increased isolation of everyone.

Is there a better way of thinking about capital?  Fortunately, yes. Recently, thanks to Toby Hemenway and other Permaculturists, I came across an eye-opening article called "Eight Forms of Capital" by Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua. Based on systems theory--conceived in terms of pools and flows--the article lays out a revised, more comprehensive definition of "capital" as any and all resources, both material and immaterial, that can be traded within a community or between them or combined ("complexed" in their lexicon) into other, more complex resources. The Eight Forms of Capital, which I have arranged holarchically, from simplest to most complex, are as follows:

1. Material Capital: Nonliving physical objects or materials which can be combined or transformed into useful tools or commodities. (Zero-sum and inherently degenerative--i.e. subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics)
2. Living (or biological) Capital: Animals, plants, microbes, fresh water, and topsoil. This kind of capital can be regenerative if wisely and prudently used, stored, and nurtured. But it is still partly zero sum--at any given moment, what one person eats or drinks cannot belong to or benefit another person (other than a mother's nursing child) as well. This is why there is competition for food and water in many parts of the world. (But it can, and does, benefit the microbes in our intestines and elsewhere that are part of our bodies' symbiotic matrix). Living capital can often, of course, be transformed into material capital as well (e.g. wood). These two--material and living capital--form the foundation of any economy or ecosystem, human or otherwise. The next four forms of capital pertain to individual human beings. 
3. Experiential Capital: The practical knowledge and skills we gain from our lived experience. These can include practical skills like housekeeping, carpentry or gardening, and can be "complexed" to form higher-level skills, such as engineering or architecture. It can be Positive Sum, in that the more experience you have, the more benefit you can bring to a community through solving their problems and teaching others what you know.
4. Intellectual Capital: This is what people go to college for; to gain the theoretical knowledge and thinking skills necessary to make wise decisions, to gain employment, and to collaborate with others on projects. Depending on the field of interest, it is generally combined with experiential capital to one degree or another. 
5. Social Capital: This refers to the "people skills" we acquire through collaborating with and socializing with others. It is likewise Positive-Sum, in that the more Social Capital you acquire, the broader your influence becomes on others, and the more you can accomplish collaboratively.
6. Spiritual Capital: This is the most abstract, least quantifiable form of capital. The Buddhists have codified it in their concept of Karma, which refers to the net consequences of any intentional action on both the inner (self) and outer (world) realms of experience. In Buddhist epistemology, Karma (spiritual capital) can be conceived as a kind of balance sheet, which transcends individual lives, and shapes our day-to-day experience.  The good news is, moreover, that Karma, (both individual and collective, past and present) while it determines the context in which we take any action, does not predetermine the action itself. Through mind training, we can learn to identify and expose the karmic roots of any thought, feeling, or impulse that arises, evaluate it accordingly, and then make a free choice as to whether to increase our karmic debt by indulging dysfunctional impulses--or pay off an installment of it by acting at that moment with wisdom and compassion.  And it is by such training--both in formal meditation and in mindful living--that we accumulate spiritual capital, manifested as loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And so, like experiential, social, and intellectual capital, spiritual capital is a positive-sum game: the more we have, the more others benefit as well. The last two forms of capital are collective, rather than individual, in that they acquire value only through group interaction:  
7. Financial Capital: No need for further comment on this, which has generally been considered the only form of capital. Money is, of course, useful as an abstract medium for trade--that is why it was invented. But since it is simply arithmetic, it has two insurmountable problems. For one, it is inherently zero-sum: if one person has it, others do not.  On a finite planet, the logic of money is exactly that of a monopoly game, and a monopoly game has only one possible outcome: the winner(s) own everything, and the losers own nothing, and owe the winners rent for their houses and hotels. That is rapidly becoming a model of the world we live in today; a world where a handful of billionaires own everything, and all the rest of us work for them, are in debt to them, or have been abandoned (or imprisoned) by them to lives of poverty, homelessness, and destitution.  The other problem is that money must grow, or else it loses its value. And the only way to "grow" money is to turn everything else into it--that is, turn nature into commodities, citizens into consumers, and communities into "markets"--until the Earth herself is denuded of life and polluted to death.  Still, in our world, we all need money to survive. But the more we can rely on the other forms of capital, the less money we will need to lead happy, fulfilling lives. 
8. Cultural Capital: The last kind of "capital" we can accumulate and trade on collectively is that bestowed upon us by our respective cultural heritages and practices. It refers, according to Roland and Landua, to "the shared internal and external processes of a community – the works of art and theater, the songs that every child learns, the ability to come together in celebration of the harvest or for a religious holiday." These days, most people acquire their cultural capital from absorption in mass media culture--which has increasingly become their only common cultural currency.  Since most mass media simply reinforce the dysfunctional cultural premises of Glomart--(More is always better; To be is to buy)--people also adhere to fragmented and mutually hostile subcultures, whether they are churches, synagogues, mosques, football fan clubs, street gangs, or right-wing hate groups on the internet. But diverse cultural capital within communities can still be a fertile and useful resource for diversifying and enriching our experience (as in Mexican or Thai restaurants, Tai Chi and Yoga classes, community theatre, etc.)

If we can learn and teach people how to think more broadly about these various different forms of capital available to us, we will go a long way toward emancipating ourselves from the tyranny of Glomart, and the inner tyranny of predicating our self-worth solely on the size of our cars and houses and stock portfolios. The best way to grow our own spiritual, social, experiential, intellectual, and even cultural capital is to devote our lives to various forms of learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

To what should I devote my life?

As we contemplate our threatening and uncertain future these days, with everything falling apart at once due to a "perfect storm" of accelerating climate change, deterioration of our global ecological support system, disintegration of our social fabric--both nationally and internationally--into outright fascism, belligerent nationalism, warmongering, corporate and military predation, and fanatical hatreds on all sides, we all face a searing question that has been memorably posed by environmental journalist Dahr Jamail in his recent book The End of Ice:

“From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“

Answers will vary, of course. Some, perhaps most affluent people, will opt for hedonistic denial--continue pursuing their private dreams of bigger houses, luxury vacations, large SUVs, exciting new career possibilities, idyllic vacations, happy children, and so forth. Like drunken passengers on a cruise ship on the Niagara River, they will continue to drink, dance, and laugh, ignoring the roaring around the bend, until the boat tips over the precipice.

A vast number of others, at the poorer end of the spectrum, will be too preoccupied with daily survival in an increasingly violent and hostile world to give much thought to anything beyond getting through the day.  Those few of us who strive to remain aware and not escape into denial face a yawning vortex of despair as everything--starting with climate--goes from bad to worse with each passing day, week, and year. So how can we keep our balance on this thin line between denial and despair? In a world without hope, or where hope is increasingly elusive, to what do we devote our lives?

Some have already opted for despair.  For example, Roy Scranton, an English professor I recently heard at a bookstore, has published a self-indulgent collection of his own essays, entitled We're Doomed--Now what? For him, and for other writers like him, despair is chic. I obligingly purchased his book, only to find that he had recycled many of his earlier academic essays that had nothing to do with climate change, and that when he focused on his presumed topic, he knew nothing more about climate change than I do, but enjoyed wallowing in despair.  When I asked him if he had heard of permaculture, he shrugged off the question--how could I possibly be so naive as to offer alternatives to total despair? 

Dahr Jamail's own response to his question is far more nuanced, although he admits that he must reformulate it from day to day, fending off the vortex of despair as he goes. And that is simply to devote his life to doing good, which in his own case as a journalist and activist, means exposing the cruelty and mendacity of the powerful, and faithfully describing what he sees and what he is told by researchers, in order--against all odds--to awaken his readers to reality. 

My own response, likewise, varies from day to day.  But it is rooted in my cultivation of the Dharma--the ongoing awareness of impermanence, interbeing, and oneness. One practice I find very useful is what Buddhists call "The Five Remembrances"--five inescapable realities of life that most of us prefer not to think about. By deliberately calling them up, as a meditation practice, we familiarize ourselves with them, and they are less threatening to our equanimity, which in turn is a prerequisite to our generic daily agenda: being well, doing good work, and keeping in touch. The five remembrances are as follows (as rendered by Thich Nhat Hanh)

1. I am of the nature to get sick; there is no way to avoid getting sick.

2. I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way to avoid growing old.

3. I am of the nature to die; there is no way to avoid dying.

4. I am of the nature to lose everything I cherish; there is no way to avoid losing everything.

5. My actions are my only true possession; by my actions shall I live.

On days when I feel overwhelmed with grief and rage for what we are doing, in our ignorance, greed, and denial, to our unique and magnificent living planet, I modify the first four remembrances by adding in the larger extensions of the first-person subject, as follows:

1. "I (and my community, and Gaia) am of the nature to get sick; there is no way to avoid getting sick..."

--and so forth.  The effect of this practice, sincerely applied as often as necessary, is to restore my equanimity once again, so I can resume my Dharma quest to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness--to practice Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share, and to learn Gaia, teach Gaia, heal Gaia, and create Gaia--up to my last breath, no matter what happens.

A Truffula Seed

This is an initial draft of a sermon I plan to deliver at UUCS in early April.

CENTERING THOUGHT:

While western colonialist culture believes in “rights”, many indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself. When I orient myself around the question of what my obligations are, a deeper question immediately arises: from this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life? –Dahr Jamail

READING:  [Excerpts from] The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss, ending with the line,

"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.

"So catch!" cried the Onceler; he let something fall.
"It's a truffula seed, the last one of all.
You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds.
And truffula trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack,
Then the Lorax and all of his friends
may come back."

SERMON:

I've always been a Dr. Seuss fan.

So when I first encountered The Lorax, in 1971, shortly after great national awakening of Earth Day 1970, it resonated deeply. I remember a party with my college friends, where I brought my copy to show them, and a flamboyant, theatrical young woman in our group named Nancy entertained us all with a dramatic reading. When she got to the moral of the story, the party fell silent as she paused dramatically on the half line:

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Dr. Seuss was right, of course. Nothing has gotten any better--only a whole lot worse, since that evening some 48 years ago. Unlike Dr. Seuss's penitent villain, the Oncelers of the real world--from Monsanto to Exxon Mobil to Donald Trump--have yet to repent, even as the "grickle grass" grows up all around us: toxic pollution of land, air, rivers, and even the ocean; deforestation and desertification; loss of biodiversity;  and above all, the looming spectre of accelerating climate change from fossil fuels that threatens our common future. Yet the Oncelers still rule, with their unshakeable faith in the economics of "biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering!"

But the Onceler is not just the villain. He is also the penitent first-person narrator, telling his sad story to the little boy--the stand-in for the reader--below his dark, isolated tower. And in making this narrative choice, Dr. Seuss knew exactly what he was doing.

We are all, after all, Oncelers--not just the rich and powerful. From the time of the Agricultural Revolution, some 12,000 years ago, we have drawn a conceptual barrier--that had not previously existed in any human tribe-- between "man" and "nature"; between the "civilized" and the "wild." On this side, in our cities and cultivated fields, we were safe. Outside of these--the "wild," was a place of both danger and opportunity. The danger came first from wild animals who would threaten us or our crops--whether lions, tigers, bears, wolves, or deer, rats, mice, and swarms of locusts all feeding on our crops. The opportunity came from the fact that the Wild was lawless--a place where no constraints applied, and we could find some new "resource"--whether forests, minerals, or--significantly, other arable land we could raid and steal from those already there, clearcut, and plant with monocultures to feed our growing population.  The entire history of our agro-industrial civilization--from the walls of ancient Babylon to Trump Tower--could be seen as the inexorable working-out of this basic Onceler ideology--that "nature" is nothing but a "resource" for human expansion, and it has no value at all until it is transformed into commodities for sale and profit.

So when the Onceler arrives to set up shop amid the beautiful Truffula Trees, waving in the breeze and nurturing a rich ecosystem of "brown barbaloots, "humming fish" and "swomee swans," he, like our ancestors and most entrepreneurs today, sees it as nothing but a "resource" to turn into hot-selling commodities like "thneeds" as quickly as possible.

While the Onceler represents the powerful corporate and industrial interests who have everything to gain and nothing to lose from plundering the planet and exploiting its inhabitants in order to maximize their profits, the Lorax--the fuzzy little guy who "speaks for the trees" and pesters the Onceler to no avail, is an apt image of the environmental movement, in which I have been an active participant throughout my life. But the nagging Lorax only creates contempt and resentment in the Onceler, who shrugs him off, while he keeps "biggering"--until the last Truffula Tree falls.

So it is with the Environmental Movement, which after a few early victories such as banning DDT and the Endangered Species Act, is now again on the defensive, first ridiculed and marginalized on Fox News by corporate toadies like Rush Limbaugh, and now in full retreat under the onslaught of Trump and his billionaire minions in the fossil fuel industry, who have launched an all-out attack on every environmental regulation they could find.

 So I would like to focus on the final passage--where the now-repentant Onceler entrusts the young boy--a stand-in for the reader--with the very last truffula seed of them all. This precious truffula seed is the key to the boy's understanding of the word inscribed on the pedestal in the midst of the gloomy, dying landscape: UNLESS. The hope it embodies is entirely conditional: a seed must be planted in good soil, in the right climate conditions, nurtured with "clean water and fresh air," and protected "from axes that hack" if it is to be viable.

This truffula seed--and not the futile nagging of the Lorax himself--is thus the key to the allegory in Dr. Seuss's tale. But is there a viable truffula seed in a time like ours, when everything seems to be falling apart at once?

Many proposed solutions for our current global crisis are floating around these days. They fall into three broad categories: technological fixes, political action, and personal or community-based initiatives. Unfortunately, none are very convincing.

Technological fixes, like proposals to geo-engineer the atmosphere or extract excess CO2, are prohibitively expensive and would require an unprecedented level of cooperation among the world's governments to pull them off. And even then, as completely untested technologies, they might backfire badly. Also, they embody the same kind of linear mentality that caused the problem to begin with: shield the atmosphere from excess solar radiation, and then we can carry on with business as usual, drilling more oil and gas, plundering our resources for commodities, cutting down forests to build more suburbs, and "biggering and biggering..."

Political solutions, like the Green New Deal, are courageous and inspiring, but face a huge uphill battle against entrenched corporate interests with vast pools of money to buy off politicians and saturate the airwaves with hysterical propaganda about "socialism." And even if, against all odds, this bold initiative passed, it would face entrenched and ongoing opposition from those with a vested interest in the status quo.

Personal solutions fall into two categories: green consumerism and adaptation. Green consumerism refers to the notion of personal responsibility--if we each make changes in our purchasing habits to reduce our ecological footprint, the net effect will be to reduce overall carbon emissions, and thereby save our planet. In theory, this is true. But as Bob Dylan once said, "Most people don't do what they believe in; they just do what's most convenient, and then they repent." And of course, a multi-billion dollar advertising industry is out there brainwashing us day and night with appeals to convenience--spelled P-L-A-S-T-I-C--regardless of environmental consequences.

This leaves adaptation, whether it is cities spending billions to wall in their waterfronts to protect against sea level rise, or smaller-scale "transition town" movements, where people teach each other the skills they will need to grow their own food, build their own houses, create their own currency, and so forth--to secede, in effect, from the rest of the dying world.  But such transition towns could quickly devolve into entrenched, embittered survivalist communities, bristling with weapons behind high walls and barbed wire. Who wants to live like that? As Robert Frost once said, "Something there is that does not love a wall."

So what is left?  In this time of rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, as we collectively face a terrifying future of combined environmental, social, and economic collapse, what can we do? How do we navigate the treacherous waters between the alluring Scylla of television-induced denial and the Charybdis--the vortex--of despair? Where can we find this precious Truffula Seed of resolution, and how can we nurture it?

If I had an easy answer to this dilemma we all face, I would already have collected my Nobel Prize. I don't. So I think we all need to find our own Truffula Seed--our own still center from which to face the day, beyond false hope, and beyond abject and useless despair. So I will offer my own Truffula seed. If it works for you, plant it and cultivate it; if not, improvise.

My Truffula seed is a dicot, in that it consists of two complementary commitments we all can make. The first is a formal statement of a Gaian Categorical Imperative--an ethical code to live by:

"In everything you do, strive to assume responsibility for the health, competence, and resilience of yourself, your community, and our living Earth--simultaneously."

Health, competence, and resilience are the three essential survival values of every living system at every scale from the simplest one-celled organism to the blue whale--to us. Health is internal homeostasis--being well. Competence is the ability to thrive within, and serve the needs of, an existing, predictable community--doing good work. And Resilience is the ability to adapt to unpredictable changes in the world around us--keeping in touch.

 If we benefit ourselves in ways that are destructive to our community, we will probably end up in jail. If we benefit our communities in ways that are destructive to the planet, we may become billionaires--but our children will curse our bones. Only when we benefit all three--ourselves, our communities, and our planet--are we doing truly good work: learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

The second commitment is a simple slogan, a plan of action for the first. Here it is:

"Grow gardens; grow community; grow awareness."

Growing gardens improves our own health and that of the Earth by reducing our dependence on topsoil-destroying, pesticide-dependent corporate agriculture. It also strengthens our bonds with our neighbors and community. As Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton once said, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

Growing community improves our individual and collective competence.

Growing awareness enhances our resilience, both individually and collectively.

Our garden begins, not in our backyard, but in our heads. It begins
by reclaiming the present moment. This was a core teaching of the eminent Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. In all our anxiety about our future, we forget the simple fact that the present is all there is. The past is gone, and the future hasn't happened yet.  Both past and future are what the Buddhists call "mental formations,"--fabrications of the mind with no basis in reality. The past is irretrievable; all we can do is learn from it. The future is imaginary. We have no way of knowing for sure what will happen even tomorrow, to say nothing of ten or twenty years from now. We know, however, that our future--and that of our children--will be shaped--and constrained--by decisions we have made in the past, but also--more importantly--by the decisions we make in the present moment. So how do we reclaim the present moment?

By breathing, observing, and letting go. We breathe in order to observe; we observe in order to let go; and we let go in order to breathe. The minute we do so, we calm down, our breath becomes more slow and even, our heartbeats more regular. Simply breathing reconnects our minds and our bodies, bringing us back to the present moment. Our breath is our home base, connecting us to the Earth and to one another.

Then we can turn to our day's agenda, by renewing three simple vows.  The radio host Garrison Keillor had a wonderful sign-off on his morning radio program, "Writer's Almanac" which I have adopted for my own generic daily agenda:  "Be well; Do good work; and Keep in Touch."

Be well--take care of this precious body while you have it. One good way of doing this is by growing fresh, organic vegetables in your own gardens. This enhances your health, competence, and resilience simultaneously.

Do good work--focus mindfully on the tasks at hand, for the best interests of yourself, your community, and the planet as a whole. This is a good way to build competence and grow community.

Keep in touch--take care of everyone, and abandon no one. This is a great way of developing your own and others' resilience and growing awareness.

So I would like to leave you with a simple guided meditation that I use in my own daily meditation practice, to maintain my equanimity and focus no matter what happens in the world around me. It consists of ten verb phrases, on the breath, divided into two sets of three and one of four.

The first set helps us re-inhabit the moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go.
The second (with gratitude to Garrison Keillor) helps us reclaim the day: Be well, do good work, keep in touch.
And the third consists of four general life goals around which we can orient ourselves--the only things worth doing with our lives:

Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create.

This is my Truffula seed--my way of reconnecting every day with my still center and renewing my own commitment to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. It is yours to use if it works for you; if not, improvise.

So I would like to try a guided meditation today. Please sit up, straight and relaxed, settling into your breath as we contemplate and practice these injunctions on the breath:

Breathing...observing...letting go...
Being well...doing good work...keeping in touch
Learning...teaching...healing...creating...