Innocence Lost

Cities of Texas from Space

Let's have a thought experiment. Let's suppose I could wave a magic wand and everybody on the planet started living sustainably. Stopped wasting, stopped unnecessary consumption, stopped unnecessary energy consumption, recycled, grew some major part of their food, the whole bit. Would that actually solve the problem this planet is having? That by itself? I would say, the answer is probably no.

Let's recap the problems for those who might just be joining us. Human beings are a cancer of this planet, heating up the world while destroying the life web of this world at a breakneck pace, killing the oceans, expanding at the expense of that which actually is keeping it alive. I am not going to paint a smiley face on it, look at that picture above. I live there. It's a picture of cancer, and I am nestled in the heart of one of the major tumors.

Even if, in my little fantasy thought experiment, every person in every one of these cities, and everywhere else in the world started living with a massively reduced resource footprint, there are still too many people for the planet to sustain in a healthy way. Sure, it would be a step in the right direction, it would give us more time, and if we also had massive compulsory worldwide birth control we might actually die down to a sustainable level in a hundred years or so. Of course as I mentioned, this thought experiment is an abject fantasy. Nothing of the sort is ever going to happen. Nothing is going to happen until Nature actually starts collapsing enough to force it to happen, with all the attendant ecological, economic, political and social upheaval that would follow in its wake. At that point, shit is going to start getting real very quickly.

Thoughts like these are why I like The Dark Mountain Project (http://dark-mountain.net/). They actually get it. 

"The Dark Mountain Project is a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself. We see that the world is entering an age of ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling, and we want our cultural responses to reflect this reality rather than denying it."

-The Dark Mountain Project

NOW, let's suppose (another fantasy thought experiment) we have a magic golden bullet. A magic golden bullet for pruning Homo Sapiens to sustainable levels without otherwise inflicting lasting harm on the planet. This magic bullet is a disease with a long incubation time (5+ years), very highly transmissible during that time, and a 90% mortality rate. Perfect. Basically the entire planet catches the disease before they even know the disease exists, 90% of Homo Sapiens dies, problem solved right? Right?

A friend posed a good question: what makes me think we wouldn't do it all over again?

What makes me think that those remaining 10% aren't going to go, "We need to get this consumer civilization back up and running ASAP!" Will these 10% not look back upon the age of Iphones and jet planes and regard it as a mythic era and a model for their own aspirations, not unlike the way the Renaissance looked backwards to the glory of Greece and Rome? What is to keep it from all starting again?

Nothing. Not a damn thing. Having a second chance doesn't mean you won't wind up doing the same things all over again. Given the general short-sightedness of the species, I would even call it likely.

In fact, in certain ways it already HAS happened: many great civilizations have fallen over the millennia and it hasn't seemed to cure us of the habit.

All of these things do not mean that we should give up on sustainability, only that we must look clearly at what faces us. Sustainability is the right decision, even if it might not fix the problem alone. Ultimately the problem is civilization itself, and we have to lose our illusions about civilization itself and face this truth: civilization itself is violence against Nature. If people do understand that, there is a chance that we might actually use any second chances we get.

There was a time, once, when we lived in almost complete ignorance of civilization and of the unbalanced powers that Mankind could wield. For hundreds of thousands of years, it was a nonissue. We probably can't ever now return to that state of innocence, we can only hope against hope that we can understand how to restrain the powers of the human mind and human greed.

The goddess Inanna brought a gift to humanity from the god of wisdom, Enki.

It was a box containing all the blessings and curses of civilization. It contained all the art and music and craftsmanship and grandeur and all the war and strife and desolation and evil of which civilization was capable. Inanna spoke:

"This is our gift to you, civilization. And you must take it. And once taken, you can never give it back."

-Sumerian myth