written 20 August 2023
published 27 August 2023
Last week Minnesota experienced baseball sized hail, twice. Ottawa, Frankfurt, Clermont-Ferrand, France, and Washington DC all had flooding. 200 ships wait in line as drought slows passage through the Panama Canal. A third heatwave hit southern Europe. Portland experienced 108°F, Qeshm Dayrestan, Iran reported 178°F heat index, and the ocean off southern Florida was above 100°F again. Canadian fires, their largest on record, forced evacuation of Yellowknife, and Kelowna.
The climate crisis is already here and accelerating, yet Republican dogma remains "climate change is a liberal hoax". The war on "woke" is by folks who are asleep, stuck in a nightmare, yearning for a world that no longer exists. While everyone has to awaken at their own pace, I choose to talk to those already engaging with the accelerating avalanche of change.
In 2005, Jared Diamond wrote "Collapse", which describes the failure of three historic societies out of synch with their regional climate change. He identified three precursors of a civilization on the verge of collapse: a persistent pattern of environmental change for the worse; signs that existing modes of agriculture or industrial production were aggravating the crisis; and an elite failure to abandon harmful practices and adopt new means of production. At some point, a critical threshold is crossed and collapse invariably follows.
Concerns about the climate crisis have grown over the last few decades, and what has been foretold as future possibilities are now making daily news. More alarming is the magnitude and speed with which they are appearing.
While apocalypse has come to be used popularly as a synonym for catastrophe, or end of the world, the Greek word from which it is derived also means a revelation, a great unveiling or disclosure of knowledge (from Wikipedia). Our most fundamental problems are caused by the growth-orientated, technological society, and cannot be solved by just more or better technology. We have to change our fundamental story of life.
The new story must be planetary. It is emerging, but unfinished, being made up collectively as we all go along. Humanity must evolve past the separation of "us versus them" into experiencing the global connectivity of reality, uncharted territory. But there are metaphors, rooted in living systems, that help open the mind from obsolete limitations of our upbring.
Despair is an ego trip, which goes like this. "I see everything that is going on, and it is all terrible and hopeless." While it may be true that all that I see is terrible, it is arrogant to believe I see "everything". As a finite being, contemplating the infinite universe, everything I "know" is either wrong, or, at best, incomplete. Acceptance of humility opens a door to peace of mind. Seemingly, a miracle will be required to resolve the totality of our problems, but a miracle is only the operation of a system I do not currently perceive or deploy.
"Spontaneous Evolution", by Lipton and Bhaerman, describes "punctuated equilibrium". Life on Earth has been confronted with an extinction challenge many times, and then evolved a whole new way of doing business. For example, the first life forms were simple bacteria, living off the abundant chemical energy of the recently cooled Earth. Over time, robust population growth began to exhaust these limited chemical resources and extinction threated. Then photosynthesis appeared, drawing energy directly from sunlight.
The evolution from individuals in lethal competition (our current state of civilization), to collectives in cooperation, has been accomplished by life at least twice. First when individual cells cooperated to become nucleated cells and second when nucleated cells cooperated to become multi-celled organisms. Humans are the beneficiaries of both these jumps, so each of us are living proof life knows how to do this.
Consider a chicken egg as it grows from fertilization. Starting from a single cell, in total isolation, it thrives on the stored energy and nutrition of the yolk. Eventually the yolk is exhausted and the finite volume of the shell allows no more room to grow. The old order of business faces extinction. At that point the chick hatches out into the larger world.
Our egos, experienced as personalities, are our shells, once beneficial, now lethal. The time has come to "hatch" out into experiencing the larger connected world of life. We are each called to make progress on this journey, and every success builds toward a transformational global "tipping point". Imagine what that might be!
