The Goal of My Work

The goal of my work is to encourage learning, thinking, and discussion about how humankind has created a catastrophically unsustainable way of life, why the process of collapse cannot be prevented, and how collapse survivors, if any, might learn from our many mistakes and mindfully pursue a sane way of life.

Seven-point-something billion people are sleepwalking into a dark and furious storm because of a sequence of innovative experiments called progress.  Progress is an obsession that continuously provides us with new tools for destroying the health of the ecosystem more rapidly.  Unintended drawbacks routinely outweigh the benefits — one step forward, two steps back.  We celebrate the amazing benefits and… what costs?  Our loony culture programs us to hunger for what destroys us, like the junkies of Funkytown.  This is a short path.

The safe and effective antidote is, of course, clear thinking — letting our imaginations soar away from their cages to explore new realms, questioning every truth, swerving around the tar babies of the blind faith mobs.  When clear thinking plunges into a steamy relationship with ecological history, a new and healthy mode of perception can be born.  The offspring of this romance will have an irresistible urge to push aside entertainments and distractions, race out the door, and develop a reverent and respectful relationship with the family of life that exists outside the concentration camp.

When your body becomes infected, it dispatches a SWAT team to exterminate the pathogens.  If this fails, Plan B is a fever, which raises your body temperature in an effort to fry the malicious intruders.  Fevers are never enjoyable, but they might save your life, and extend your existence by decades.  Fever seems like an apt metaphor for the collapse of the global civilization — a turbulent experience that, on the plus side, has the possibility of preserving some of the ecosystem in the end.

So, we tried.  Perceptive people sounded the alarm, “The ecosystem is in great danger!”  A SWAT team was dispatched, but they were easily blown away by the pathogens — clear thinking was decisively overwhelmed by ignorance, hysteria, and deep-rooted habits.  Thus, Plan B is now underway, fever.  Growing winds announce the approach of furious storms.  No place is safe.  It’s time to stand before the court of the family of life and submit to rough justice.  We’ve broken all of nature’s laws.

There is no consensus among the prophets as to when the misery of collapse will intensify, how long it will last, what form it will take, or what will survive.  I have no clear vision of the future, but it’s easy to identify a number of factors that will play a powerful role in fueling the fever.

Non-renewable resources are finite, and many are becoming scarce and expensive.  The global economy is totally dependent on them, and the supply is shrinking every minute, rapidly.  Is it possible to feed even one billion once petroleum becomes unavailable or unaffordable?  We’re completely unprepared, in every way, for a global transition to muscle-powered agriculture — and we’ve forgotten that primitive agriculture wasn’t sustainable either.

The climate is becoming unstable, and there are countless scientific predictions that this will worsen, and could persist for thousands of years.  Agriculture, as we know it, is only possible in the stable climate patterns that began in 9600 B.C.  Our major food crops will not maintain their current productivity in an unstable climate, if they survive at all.  The same is true for nut trees, fruit orchards, forests, wildlife, marine life, livestock, and humans.  Climate change seems likely to pull the carpet out from under our traditional strategies for basic survival.

We’re approaching the end of the antibiotic era.  Pathogens always develop resistance to these wonder drugs eventually, and the pharmaceutical industry is running out of tricks.  Humankind got a temporary reduction in the toll from infectious diseases, which contributed to several decades of skyrocketing population growth, but the bubble will not last much longer.  Crowding, malnutrition, poor sanitation, and high mobility ensure a golden age recovery for all persecuted pathogens.  Modern medicine, as we know it, does not have a long future, no matter how hard we wish.

Crowding and scarcity are the parents of conflict, and in a world with seven-point-something billion people, growing levels of intense conflict are inevitable.  There are many nuclear weapons ready for use, and each of them is vastly more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.  There are also chemical weapons, biological weapons, cyber weapons, explosives, old-fashioned skull openers, and secret weapons we’ve never heard of. 

There are 400+ nuclear power plants in the world, and the worst-case scenario for even one of them could make vast regions uninhabitable for many thousands of years.  We have yet to experience a worst-case event, but they seem certain.  If reactors are not carefully decommissioned prior to problems, worst-case events are almost guaranteed.  Decommissioning is an extremely expensive process that takes years — but instead of an aggressive global campaign to do this as soon as possible, they’re contemplating building even more nuke plants!

There are surely a number of other loose cannons that will be smashing into the crowd, but let’s not get gloomy here.  Clearly, there is no brighter future ahead for civilization, which is good, because it’s the opposite of sustainable.  It’s terminally and incurably ill.  What then?

History informs us that all civilizations die, and that their survivors typically regroup and repeat the same mistakes, using the same skills and tools.  Today’s global civilization is fossil-powered, and its collapse can only be replaced by societies that are primarily muscle-powered.  Climate change seems likely to radically redesign the planet’s ecosystems.  It might be impossible to repeat the same mistakes, because they’ll no longer work.

And now, at long last, I shall get to my point.  Anyone who explores an assortment of books that discuss aspects of ecological history will soon perceive civilization as bloody screaming insanity, because it has zero regard for ecosystem health and stability, or for the future.  It’s pure madness.

In 1975, at the conclusion of 17 years of education, I was absolutely clueless about the extraordinary costs of industrial civilization, and knew nothing about lower-impact alternatives.  I had never heard the words “ecology” or “sustainable.”  My brain was swollen with enormous quantities of information that was useless for living in balance with the family of life.  It took many years to shovel all that crap out, and acquire knowledge and understanding useful for recognizing good paths.

So many of the huge problems we’ve created are the direct result of our culture, which trained us to be world champion consumers, to furiously destroy the planet to the best of our ability, so help us God — and we did just that.  Countless millions have devoted much of their lives to acquiring and discarding enormous quantities of stuff they had no need for.

It’s painful to contemplate what a beautiful world this could be if we had been provided with a thorough education in ecological history — if we had a vivid understanding of the centuries-long pileup of shortsighted blunders that have led us to the brink of catastrophe.  If we had clearly comprehended the big picture, many, many super-nutjob schemes would have been completely unimaginable.

If the entire global economy suddenly died today, all the lights went out, and all money became worthless, the future would be in the hands the survivors, most of whom are clueless about genuine sustainability.  They would likely regroup and attempt to resume the same fatal mistakes that we excel at today.

Nothing can change until ideas change.  At the moment, we have access to an amazing global communication system, a powerful tool for sharing ideas.  It’s actually useful for things beyond bombarding us with cat videos, tweets, and pornography.  How long will this system continue to operate, as Peak Everything keeps pressing harder on the brakes?  It would be wise to make good use of it, before it slips beneath the waves forever.

It’s never too late to rip off our blinders and learn.  My mission is to encourage this learning.  Let’s think about it.  Let’s talk about it.  Let’s write about it, film it, paint it, sing it.  Let’s use our legendary intelligence for truly intelligent purposes.  Let’s envision futures in which our fundamental boo-boos have been tossed overboard, and our descendants are once again wild, free, and happy.  Let’s do all we can before the lights go out. 

With lots and lots of luck, and lots and lots of clear thinking, our species might still be around in 500 years, in a radically different reality, fully obedient to the laws of life.  History bets against this, but the dreamers are giddy with hope.  

Searching For Identity and Purpose

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  He understood his calling, the special role that was unique to his existence.  He consciously pursued it, and he spent his life on a path of powerful healing.

James Hillman was one of Jung’s apprentices.  Hillman did not believe that newborns came into this world as blank slates.  He saw infants as unique acorns, ready to spend their lives growing into unique oaks.  Every oak tree had a different form.  No two were identical.  The form of the tree was influenced by the information stored in the acorn from which it sprouted.

Hillman believed that every human acorn had unique characteristics, and a unique calling, purpose, or destiny.  Every person had a sacred obligation to understand that calling and live it.  This was why nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  When they found their vision, they knew their path and purpose.  This helped them avoid wasting their lives in aimless wandering.

Basil Johnston described how vision quests worked in Ojibway culture.  Once a person discovered his or her vision, they tried hard to live in accordance with it.  It was not uncommon for folks to periodically stray from their vision, or betray it, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  Every year, men and women would go on a retreat, to verify that they were still living in synch with their vision, and make any needed adjustments.

Hillman believed that modern society was a train wreck because most people were clueless about their calling, and were wandering aimlessly.  Society fed the sacred acorns into a machine that crushed them, shredded them, and converted them into standard issue industrial robots and recreational shoppers — lost souls.

On a larger scale, it’s not hard to imagine that entire communities were once guided by a collective tribal vision, before agriculture arrived.  Each wild community inhabited a unique ecosystem, and its custom-tailored vision enabled it to live in balance with the land.  This vision was passed from generation to generation, across vast spans of time, and helped to keep the life of the tribe stable and secure.  The vision guiding the human community was in harmony with the vision of the community of life — they were the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with sincere regret that I must inform you that industrial civilization has no sacred vision to guide it; it has a terminal illness.  In ages past, as civilization obliterated countless wild tribes, the visions of those tribes were forgotten.  Because of this, our society has descended into “a non-living state, and our acts have no quality.”  We are no longer like happy tadpoles or maggots, the beautiful offspring of a healthy wild ecosystem.  We have been reduced to lonely stressed-out cogs in a global economy.

What can we do?  Is it possible to remember what was lost?  Native Americans have told me yes, it is.  If you forget your instructions, just look back toward the Creator’s fire, and you’ll remember them.  But each tribe was given different instructions by the Creator.

White folks are not like tribal Indians.  We’re mongrels, having ancestors from numerous tribes, all now disintegrated or extinct.  If I have ancestors from 476 tribes, who am I?  What are my instructions?  Where is my home?  Who are my people?

If my wild ancestors were buried in 476 different lands, and all of those ecosystems have been obliterated by centuries of civilization, what good are the ancient instructions?  The aurochs are gone, the lions are gone, the forests are gone, and the salmon have been herded into concentration camps. 

The stories, songs, and ceremonies of my wild ancestors have all been lost.  Indians disagree.  They insist that all ancient wisdom is always “accessible,” and just wink when I ask how.  This is most perplexing!  I’m hoping that contemplating a sustainable future will open new doors of perception, or old ones.

I’ve lived in nine states, and my extended family is scattered everywhere.  We have become wandering homeless people.  This year, I’m living in the Willamette Valley, on land violently stolen from the Kalapuya.  As a people, the Kalapuya had never forgotten their vision.  They celebrated their lives in a paradise of abundant life, and they knew how to live in balance with it.  It was easy.  All they had to do was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors, the ancient time-proven vision of the community.

The Kalapuya were forced out of their home by the white invaders, who had strayed far from their ancestral home, and had no vision for living in harmony.  The invaders built the city that I live in, which is insane, and is in the process of committing suicide.  It has no spiritual connection to the land, or to life.  Indeed, the entire nation is lost and insane.  This is not encouraging.

Today, the invaders’ culture is a childlike fantasy world of gadget worshippers — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.

The purpose of existence is to make lots of money, by any means necessary, and spend it in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the ever-changing fads of consumer society.  Stan Rowe perceived that consumers were raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror, and far too little outdoors with the family of life.

Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  Consumers have a deep longing to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness and freedom.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms, soon followed by a return to gnawing hollowness.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

I can’t get off the bus and live like a Kalapuya.  The deer, elk, and salmon are mostly gone now, replaced by endless herds of automobiles and cell phone zombies.  The land has been chopped up into thousands of parcels of private property, where my presence is not welcome.  In this reality, a sustainable way of life is impossible.

John Trudell says that we cannot have a spiritual connection to the future if we have lost the connection to our past.  It’s essential that we remember that everyone has ancestors who were tribal people — admirable folks who were solidly connected to the circle of life, and lived in harmony with it. 

We are, at root, tribal people who have been colonized.  Colonization is a component of the spiritual disease that gave birth to domestication.  It’s a mindset devoted to a mining way of life, eating up tomorrow, for no honorable purpose.  At the core of our healing process is decolonizing our minds, remembering that we are wild tribal people — human beings — not miners.