Writing at the end of the world

The end of the Mayan Calendar has come and gone. As tsunamis and firestorms have not yet entirely engulfed the world, the onward march of days tempts us to pat ourselves on the back and conclude that everything will be right as rain.

If only that were so.

While I was on the board of Real Change, editor Tim Harris was accused of using his column to write the same rant over and over. I couldn’t agree more. And I thank Tim for doing so.

Real Change challenges a vision we hear expressed so universally that we never think to question it. Author Daniel Quinn pointedly identifies this vision in his novel Ishmael: man exists to take from an Earth made just for him. Always will the crops grow, the fish multiply, and the rains fall. Every billboard, TV ad, political speech serves this one idea: you deserve more, and there is more to take. The voice of our shared world culture, says Quinn, lulls us to sleep with such false reassurance. Harris challenges us to wake up and see the truth.

Why must we challenge this vision? Because is not viable. Whether with a bang or a whisper, a world built on such a vision will end. Not only is limitless consumption impossible on our finite planet, but in the meantime it guarantees two things: growth and inequality. Excess food results in population growth. Growth supplies labor well beyond that needed to grow food, and said labor is exploited to produce goods hoarded by the few. The two are inextricably linked. Unchecked, this vision has played out in a population that has grown from one billion to seven billion in the last 200 years, compared to the 10,000 years it took to grow from a mere 10 million, to that first billion. And it has produced the greatest gap between rich and poor in human history, in which the world’s three richest men have greater wealth than the 48 poorest countries.

Once again: the world’s three richest men own more than the 48 poorest countries.

If growth and inequality are the predicted consequences of unbridled consumption, then healthy relationships are its first casualties. Taking more than necessary establishes the unavoidable hierarchy that some beings are worth more than others. This hierarchy is easier to maintain the farther apart are those taking and those being taken from. We avert our eyes from the homeless; we willfully ignore the children who sew our shoes and the rainforest cut to raise beef for our burgers. Real Change erases that distance. It forces us to consider the disastrous human and environmental consequences of our actions—which can occur even with the best of intentions.

As an example, consider the Grand Coulee Dam, touted as a pinnacle of both green energy and equitable wealth distribution. When my wife and I moved to the town of Omak two years ago, this concrete monolith 40 miles away fascinated me. Completed in 1942, it was supposed to not only light up the West with clean electricity, but also provide over a million acres of land to small family farms. It was the crowning achievement of FDR’s New Deal and it promised the dream of more to all.

Welcome to the desert of the real. People created loopholes such that the 40-acre family farms disappeared into parcels of 80, then 320, then 960-acre factory farms. The electricity is discounted preferentially to distant corporations while local power and infrastructure rot. The seventy-plus dams across the Columbia and its tributaries have brought one of the world’s largest salmon runs to the brink of extinction. In doing so, they have decimated a tribal nation built on these fish. Blaine Harden’s A River Lost documents how Native rates of suicide and homelessness soared after Grand Coulee’s completion. Downstream of this “clean energy” machine, the Puget Sound orca population is dwindling. And yet it gets worse: even if all the dams were removed, the salmon and those that depend on them may not survive this century. In a 2006 New Yorker article titled The Darkening Sea, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the new threat of ocean acidification. Even if we had ceased all industrial carbon dioxide production seven years ago (we haven’t), the resulting drop in pH as the oceans absorb what is already in the air could cause the extinction of all shell life (shells dissolve in acid). If shells die, coral reefs die, as does half of the phytoplankton that is the base of the entire marine ecosystem.

Imagine a world without salmon, orcas, sea turtles, penguins, dolphins. Without fish. Without fishermen.

We need voices such as Real Change to demand that we pursue a different vision, and not merely because the consequences of growth and inequality are becoming ever more horrific.

In challenging a vision built on endless consumption, we must also demand a vision built specifically on what we’ve lost: the healthy relationships whose sum is a community. Humans are one part of the web of life we call Earth. Using an approach of education, empowerment and love, organizations such as Real Change transform a commerce of taking and being taken from into a mutually beneficial exchange between equals. In a community, every relationship counts. For millions of years the basis of sustainable hunter-gatherer societies was that all members of a tribe—and of their environment—were valued, precisely because they all were needed. A UW physician, Stephen Bezruchka, has shown in numerous studies that the more egalitarian a society is the healthier it is, in every outcome that can be measured. A vision of community will serve us well in the future as it did in the past.

If Tim Harris’s editorial repeats itself, it repeatedly challenges an untenable vision of taking until there’s nothing left to take. It challenges this unfolding nihilism with the only viable alternative: a society built on community, on a love for the world, for all the world.

That, to me, sounds like a new beginning.