What to do? (Reprise) - A Biosphere Project Blog
What to do? (Reprise) - A Biosphere Project Blog
In which is told about what each of us can do to make a contribution in the coming transitions, why those may not be the things you would expect, and why it's important that everyone participate and no one thinks they can't make a difference in what's to come. With at the end a first short list with three important sources of information for you to check out, more to follow soon.
“We don't have a right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?”
Wendell Berry
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
James Baldwin
If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being."
Joanna Macy
Dear readers and followers of A Biosphere Project,
I sometimes get asked what people can do individually to make a difference in the ecological metacrisis we find ourselves in, or what role they can take in the coming transition, which as I indicated in the previous musing promises to be the “mother of all transitions”.
Many people are beginning to become more and more aware of the gravity of the situation, and want to know what to do. By no means an unimportant question. And a question that will become increasingly pertinent as the metacrisis continues to unfold and we will be increasingly confronted with a disrupted climate and extreme weather events, with the consequences of biodiversity loss, soil depletion, the disappearance of aquifers, the failure of industrial agriculture, a massive influx of climate refugees, political radicalization, and so on.
Exactly four years ago now I wrote a long text about that, even before this website was finished and even before I knew what A Biosphere Project was going to be. It was a very long text of about 13,500 words, called 'What to Do? (A List)', which I posted in its entirety on Facebook on Oct. 19, 2020. Despite the commonly held notion that no one reads long texts on Facebook, I did receive feedback showing that some people do indeed read long texts on social media. Which was a nice encouragement then, and confirmation of my suspicion that people do hunger for information, even if it is infinitely more complex than the one-syllable soundbites that call the shots on social media (pun not intended but accepted in gratitude). But above all, writing this was a kind of catharsis, a coming-into-being of something that had long been waiting to be born, an eruption that didn't want to stay within any limits.
I then listed ten things that anyone who wants to help make a difference can start doing right away. But that list did differ somewhat from the lists we usually get. The first five points were not so much about individual behavior change regarding consumption and energy use, the things that usually top that kind of list. No, the first five items all had to do with awareness, with attentive observation, with stopping denial, with deep experience of what is, and with forming community and networks, sharing information, and starting some form of activism.
Only from point six on did it become about ‘the usual advice’ like eating less or no meat or fish, buying less or no fast-fashion, and so on. And things like flying or traveling less were not even in the list, because in the bigger picture those are much less impactful than is often thought. I'll talk about that another time.
I wouldn't compile this list the same way again, but I leave the text as it is on the website because I can still broadly stand by it. And it was one of the first expressions of my new path in life, an expression of an energy that has become more and more manifest and in me.
And if I had to formulate an answer now to that same question of what anyone can do individually to help in the transitions that will be needed, I would say again that the most important thing is first and foremost to become fully aware of the situation, to stop avoidance or denial or distraction. That starts with informing yourself in an intense way, and activating your networks yourself and helping to spread information.
Changing your own behavior regarding consumption and energy use also remains appropriate, of course, but the sum of all individual good intentions is not going to save us. An enormous revolution in our global systems will be necessary, and that will only happen if enough people are asking for that. If there is support for it from the general populace. And that requires a well-informed population and many networks that share that information from below in an emergent process that comes from a broad segment of the population. I already wrote about that in the blog posts of the 'Hope' series, which you can find all here (this post will be included there too).
We must remember that the term “ecological footprint” was coined by the oil industry, to shift the “blame” to individual consumers, and mask the responsibility of the industry and capital associated with it. But we cannot expect major systems to change if we are not willing to do so ourselves. As historian Rutger Bregman so eloquently put it in this blog post, there is actually no way to really separate system and individual. They are intertwined in endless ways.
The most radical thing each of us can do to reduce our own personal “footprint” on the planet is to eat less or no meat and fish, and preferably become vegan. According to a recently published study by the University of Oxford, doing that means reducing your impact on climate, biodiversity, and land-water use by no less than two-thirds in one fell swoop. You read that right, if you go vegan, your impact on the planet is reduced by three-fourths off the bat. Even apart from what you do with your car, whether you fly anymore, and how much clothing you buy. If you make strong reductions there, too, you can reduce your impact on Mother Earth to a fraction.
You can read about this and other studies in the blog post 'Very Important Message to All.’
But as I said, the sum of all individual good intentions will never be enough to save us. For that, we need a massive systemic revolution of an order of magnitude we can hardly imagine at present. And for this, then, we need a massive information campaign and a movement from below, which first develops synergistically in the population at large before it can take shape in any social change. The reverse would not work: if any government tried to impose by force what is needed at this point, revolt would break out and that government would be chased out of the country covered with tar and feathers, or worse. Only a population that is well informed about the situation, that understands the existential seriousness of this crisis will be willing to undertake this transition. Information is crucial, along with imagination, courage, and belief in ourselves. Because at that point people will also understand that while the required revolutions will mean an end to the world as we know it, they can ultimately bring about a much BETTER world, leading to a society that exists in synergy and harmony with the wider organism of which it is a part, the biosphere
Recently, on my wanderings around the Internet, I once more came across an organization I was not yet familiar with, called 'Perspectiva', founded in 2015 by Scottish philosopher, climate activist and chess grandmaster Jonathan Rowson and Swedish sociologist, entrepreneur and member of the Club Of Rome Thomas Bjorkman.
Perspectiva describes itself in the first sentence on its website as a “community working on an urgent one hundred year project”.
An urgent one hundred year project...
That sentence stuck with me, in the almost comical obviousness with which it stated something that seems completely nonsensical in our time: thinking in the very long term. Of course, a hundred years is not even that long, in geological terms it is a fraction of a second, one three-thousandth of the time our species exists on Earth. And in the frame of galactic time it is altogether incredibly minuscule. But compared to our quarterly economic thinking, a century is already an eternity.
As I give a little follow-up or update to that 2020 text, I would argue that that is what we collectively need to do: partake in an urgent one hundred year project.
'Urgent' seems to imply that it all has to happen immediately, ‘one hundred year’ corrects that right away: it will be a work of long duration, of many generations even. But that doesn't make it any less urgent.
When I read that, I was also immediately reminded of the cathedral-builders of old. Part of the year I live in Antwerp, Belgium, and this city boasts a very special and beautiful cathedral, built between 1352 and 1521. One hundred seventy years it took to build this cathedral, which incidentally burned down completely twelve years after its completion. The restoration also took decades.
It's a fascinating idea: for the people who were working on the cathedral around say 1450, the beginnings of its construction were situated in the fog of times gone by, generations before they were born. Nor would they ever see the completion of their life's work, and nor would their children and grandchildren.
But no doubt they were driven and proud to collaborate on this masterpiece that must have seemed even more overwhelming then than today. I can hardly imagine what that must have been like, to be part of such a work of generations and generations.
And I think first of all we should try to have that kind of attitude toward what we have to do: we are embarking on an urgent one hundred year project, or rather an urgent one thousand year project, because restoring the integrity of our biosphere and developing a global society that can exist in harmony with that biosphere will take many centuries.
We are not used to dealing with time this way, or with goals or with standards of success or failure. We are not used to dealing with deep time, to connecting with the distant future or the distant past. I talked about that deep time, by the way, in the musing of December 2023 of the same name, one of the first musings of the series. We are used to thinking in weeks or quarters or at most years, but the metacrisis forces us to think and conceptualize on much longer time frames. What kind of world do we want in a century, in four centuries, in a thousand years? It seems to me that many people, consciously or unconsciously, already no longer believe that our species will survive this century, let alone the next thousand years. And that, if we survive at all, we will have to struggle endlessly in a kind of dystopia of inequality, war and ecological disaster in a battle of everyone against everyone else for the scarce remaining resources, food and water.
Let us say that our urgent one hundred year (or one thousand year) project is to go all in to turn that future into a very different one: One in which economics serves our lives instead of the other way around, one in which the constant competition between superpowers and power blocs is transformed into cooperation, one in which not GDP but the well-being of everyone becomes the measure of our society's success, one in which our bond with the organism of which we are a part, our biosphere, will be one of respect, synergy, and wisdom, one in which we no longer see nature as something outside of us, but as the wider and sacred organism of which we are a part.
But such a project, then, will require first and foremost information, networking and new forms of connectivity and emergence, dissemination of new ideas from the bottom up. And that process is already underway. It is my intention in the near future to share a lot of links to organizations and internet platforms that are already on that path, forming a growing network of “bottom-up causation,”a network of networks spreading under the radar of our mainstream media.
And each of you can play a role in that: by sharing information within your own network, by constantly informing yourself as well, by being passionate about it as well. Why not, if our future and that of our children and grandchildren depends on it? It is up to us, who else? And each of us can also play a big role in this, within our own network of friends, family, colleagues, associations, and so on.
Inform yourself, which is also what social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger said at the end of the previous musing. Inform yourself and share that information. Engage in the conversation, start a blog, share things on social media and through email, use your imagination and be creative and daring and share my blog and musings, if you appreciate them or find them important.
Informing yourself does require that you look beyond the mainstream media, which continue to underreport this meta-crisis and portray only a fraction of the situation. You have to turn to specialized publications, organizations and individuals who are already getting started and sending valuable and reliable information into the world.
Separating the wheat from the chaff in this matter is no easy task in these times of disinformation and junk information on social media and YouTube. Therefore, one of my intentions with the blog and website is to share information about these organizations and individuals, think-tanks and research centers that are doing valuable and reliable work. In the near future, I also want to provide a page in the new menu for links, and interpret and concisely introduce these organizations. The invitation then is for you to take that further yourself and help share this information further.
Let me already start by sharing some of my main sources of information:
Post Carbon Institute is a think-tank founded by Richard Heinberg, one of the world's foremost experts on energy and the transition to a “post-carbon” society.
PCI brings together many top experts and visionaries in an ongoing fascinating thought exercise, which is, however, not all doom and gloom. The situation is (extremely) serious, but not hopeless. Explore their site and read and listen to the podcasts. In their approach, the ecological crisis is not isolated from broader social developments and related crises, but rather linked to all possible social and economic evolutions, the only approach that makes sense.
Resilience is one of PCI's “broadcast channels”: a fascinating site with an apt name because resilience is what we will need. Expect many essays from experts and thinkers who also publish on many other platforms, and texts that consider the metacrisis in the broadest possible way.
The podcast 'What Could Possibly Go Right' features interviews with experts around that great thought exercise: what could indeed go right ? Can anything go right? How could things work out in the end ? For a taste you can already listen to this episode with the great Joanna Macy, author of 'World As Lover, World As Self'.
The Great Simplification is Nate Hagens' podcast focusing on systems science regarding our situation on the planet, specifically around ecology, economics, energy and all the ways in which we are unaware of what energy actually is, the extraordinary role fossil fuels occupy in our civilization, and why we shouldn't hope to get rid of that without pain.
An ongoing exercise in observing correctly, analyzing correctly, and stopping looking away from all-too-obvious facts. But also a constant perspective that what we will lose may also mean a gain on a human level, and that the world that awaits us will probably be much simpler than the current one (hence the name “Great Simplification”) but possibly (if we do it right) also much more wholesome to live in.
Nate Hagens also has a YouTube channel where you will find many fascinating interviews with leading thinkers and experts.
Those are already a few for starters, expect (much) more in the future ‘links’ page.
Information, knowledge, imagination, courage, faith, and above all love for our planet will be key to a different future. Let us not act out of fear of all the difficult things coming our way, but out of love for life, and for the miraculous fact that we exist, and that anything at all exists rather than nothing. The wonder of life, and the love for all that lives, can give us the energy to face the coming ‘mother of all transitions’.
In a future follow-up to this blog post, I will share some more ideas about how we can ground ourselves differently (and better) in ourselves in light of all these challenges. And how by loving ourselves more we can also already make a huge contribution to the whole, and to the future of our world.
With love to you all, thank you for reading, until the next installment,
All the best to you,
Filip
