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Extinction and the Revolution of Love

January 30, 2020 by Charles Eisenstein

January 2020
This essay has been translated in French, German, and Spanish.


1. No demand is big enough

Contrary to its self-conception, Extinction Rebellion is not actually about climate change. The climate issue is, rather, the vehicle for the expression of a deeper yearning. Greta Thunberg and the climate strikers embody a refusal to comply with a system that is anti-life. “I will not go to school. I will not participate in this. I want no part of the program.”

The climate emergency gives form to an intuitive, inarticulate alienation from the project of civilization as it stands. It offers a focal point to identify as the source of wrongness. It channels onto one thing the revolutionary aspiration to change everything. But if we were to awaken tomorrow to the news that the science was mistaken and global temperatures have leveled off, the driving energy of the protestors would persist. That is because they recognize that the challenge facing humanity is not “How do we sustain business-as-usual using carbon-neutral fuels?” Business-as-usual is not OK, and switching fuels will not make it so. Like the anti-war radicals of the 1960s, like the anti-globalization protestors of the 90s, like the Occupy Wall Street occupiers, they do not aspire to modest reforms. They know that modest reforms do not reach deep enough. They recognize, whether consciously or not, that ecocide is a feature and not a bug of the current socioeconomic system. They know that we can do better than a world of unrelenting poverty, inequality, warfare, domestic violence, racism, and environmental destruction. And they know that each of these generates the others.

In other words, the issue is not whether our current civilization is sustainable. Do we even want to sustain it? Can’t we do better than this?

Speaking at the inauguration of the Berlin Extinction Rebellion camp last October, I hazarded a guess about what the movement is really about. What we really want, I said, is for humanity to hold nature sacred again. What we want is to move from a society of domination to one of participation, from conquest to co-creation, from extraction to regeneration, from harm to healing, and from separation to love. And we want to enact this transition in all our relations: ecological, economic, political, and personal. That is why we can say, “The revolution is love.”

Such a goal does not easily translate into politically articulable demands. Every demand I could make is either too small or too big. If it is politically conceivable, the demand is too small. If it is within the power and willingness of existing political authorities to implement, if it fits within the current political universe, it must not require fundamental change. At best, such demands alleviate a symptom or suggest a direction we might follow, a destination we might aspire to. At worst, they would have us play a diverting tune to accompany the world’s death-march.

If, on the other hand, we issue demands commensurate with the magnitude of the change we wish to see, then pray tell: of whom are these demands to be made? Do we imagine that the global industrial economy and its surrounding political apparatus are a freight train, and we can simply ask the engineer to throttle the engine? The political and corporate elites are as helpless as everyone else, subject to forces beyond their control and, for the most part, beyond their understanding. What we really want – the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible, and whose unrealized possibility will instigate new rebellion with each generation – is beyond the power of any authority to grant. That does not mean it is impossible, nor that we are helpless to serve its becoming. What it means is that the language of demanding may not be appropriate.

The fossil-fuel based system has enormous momentum. It is woven into every facet of modern life, from medicine to agriculture to transport, manufacturing, and housing. Every activist must understand that a demand to get off fossil fuels is a demand to change everything, and that this demand is impossible to fulfill. Its goal is not impossible; a change in everything is what we are here to serve. But it cannot be realized as a demand, because there is no one with the power to fulfill it.

Even the articulated demands of Extinction Rebellion are impossible for currently constituted power to fulfill. Look what happens when governments do so much as increase fuel taxes. Riots and protests around the globe, from France to Ecuador to Zimbabwe to Indonesia, follow hikes in fuel prices, and governments must either capitulate or send in the troops to quell unrest. (Usually they do both, since canceling the price rises cannot assuage the deeper unrest that they tapped into.) Since fossil fuels are integral to global society, to transition away from them entails society’s total disruption. It is not just a matter of replacing fossil fuels with solar, wind, and biomass, perhaps applying carbon capture devices and geoengineering technologies to draw down carbon and allow business as usual to continue. No. The intermittency problem, land use requirements, and limits to supplies of rare earth minerals make this infeasible. But even if we could continue business as usual, do we really want to?

By framing anything as a demand, we entrench existing political power relationships. We limit what we can achieve to what those in power can grant. We confer power upon those whom we hold powerful, and inevitably set them up as enemies when they fail to enact the ultimatum.

A demand implies a threat: “Do as I say – or else!” To make a demand, backed by the threat of force or at least the threat of inconvenience, that someone is unable to fulfill is to make them an adversary. Movements that do this tend to shrink over time, not grow. Alienated from the public they are trying to save and unable to achieve tangible results, they shrink into a self-righteous cadre of martyrs. We have seen the same pattern play out again and again. Inevitably, the police confirm the self-righteousness by committing some act of brutality in the course of maintaining order. The debate becomes about whether the police violence is justified, whether violent measures are justified in turn, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. The protests themselves become the issue, rather than what the protests are about. The protestors attempt to leverage each incident of police violence to shift public opinion to their side – we must be the good guys, because look how bad the government is. A media war ensues, a struggle to control the narrative. Within their separate media bubbles and social media echo chambers, each side becomes more and more convinced of its virtue and of the other side’s turpitude. In this way, both sides enact the archetypical drama we call war, adopting the age-old assumption that the key to solving any problem is to overcome an enemy. Progress is won through a fight, a struggle for domination. Can we not see that the same domination mentality underlies civilization’s ecocide? Another kind of revolution beckons.

There is a certain comfort in establishing a set of enemies as the key to solving a crisis. We replace a goal we don’t know how to achieve (changing everything) with one we do (toppling a leader, overthrowing a government, seizing political power). In this way, the illusion of power diverts our revolutionary energy onto a lesser goal. If the engineer won’t throttle the engine, why, we’ll toss him off the train and throttle it ourselves. Probably, like most revolutionaries, we will fail to seize control at all. In the unlikely event that we succeed and find ourselves in the engine room, we will discover we are just as incapable of throttling the engine as its previous occupant was.

None of this is to say we should just give up and go home. Let us trust hope. Authentic hope is not a distraction from reality, it is the premonition of a possibility. To reach it, we have to step outside conventional problem-solution vicious circle, in which each solution generates the same problem in another guise. The conventional diagnosis of the climate change problem is itself part of the problem, and so, therefore, are the solutions that come of it. Stepping outside of it, we may arrive at different demands and, more importantly, ways that address the crisis that lie outside the mentality of demanding altogether.

2. Exclusion and Carbon Reductionism

The incapacity of our leaders to make significant changes mirrors the incapacity of the public. I heard a story of some London protestors who managed to halt an Underground train. Doubtless, they were thinking that any inconvenience suffered by the passengers is nothing compared to saving the human race from extinction. Dramatic action is needed! Maybe a general boycott of all fossil-fuel transport. Well, the passengers were not supportive. One said, “Maybe I’m on my way to the hospital – have you thought of that?” Many were working class, commuting to jobs upon which their families depend. To a greater or lesser degree, most people’s lives are likewise wedded to the world-destroying machine. Appealing to personal virtue to persuade people to use less, burn less, ride less, is pointless when they inhabit a system that requires them to use, burn, and ride just to survive.

The disruptive tactics alienate people who suffer the disruption, signaling, “We are willing to sacrifice you to The Cause.” “We are here to save you – whether you like it or not!” In doing that, the protesters are creating in their public relations the same us-them dynamics that pertain to their relationship to the authorities.

Can you think of other contexts where some must be sacrificed, against their will, for the greater good? Where some beings are just in the way of progress? Where the freedom of someone is overridden without her consent? This is not to say that one must obtain the consent of everyone affected before initiating a protest action. It is simply to take them into account. To pause for a moment to see the world through their eyes, and to understand their experience of life. It is to embrace empathy. Empathy is unavailable when the fog of judgment clouds the heart.

Adding to public distrust of activists is the self-righteousness that is coded into appeals to personal virtue. If we hold ourselves virtuous for our activism and low-carbon lifestyles, and grant ourselves self-approval and membership in the ranks of the moral, we thereby cast others into the ranks of the immoral, the ignorant, the wrong. The more we douse ourselves in the perfume of virtue, the more we give off the stench of sanctimony. We would be more effective if, rather than holding ourselves apart in unforgiving judgement, we would seek to understand deeply the totality of the circumstances of those we judge. That is called inclusivity. It is the gateway to a revolution of love.

Much of the exclusivity of the environmental movement stems from the reduction of “green” to a function of carbon accountancy – a dangerous simplification that leaves out the beings, including human beings, who seem not to “count.” What is the carbon contribution of whales? Sea turtles? The tube riders? Homeless? Prisoners? Nightingales? Owls? Wolves? When will we learn that the beings we exclude end up being the most important of all? When will we learn that we are all in this together? This is not the kind of revolution where we sacrifice some beings for “the cause” of saving the world, it is one where we recognize that healing will come through valuing the devalued. After all, what has been othered, excluded, and devalued more than nature herself? To value nature’s beings in terms of carbon, a measurable quantity subject to the customary cost-benefit analyses, is not a very big departure from valuing her beings in terms of money. Everyone and everything left out of that valuation will come back to haunt us, because the truth is that all are important in maintaining conditions for thriving life.

What is devalued when we count carbon? What is not counted? Well, ecosystems for one. To scale up “green energy” technologies such as solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, and electric vehicles would require a vast expansion of mining. Does the reader understand what a major mining operation looks like? It isn’t an innocuous hole in the ground. Here’s a description of the Peñasquito silver mine in Mexico:

Covering nearly 40 square miles [100 square kilometers], the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that’s 7 miles around and as high as a 50-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone.

To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Peñasquito. Just for silver.

Similar mines are necessary to meet renewable energy’s increased demand for copper, neodymium, lithium, cobalt, and other minerals. Each takes a bite out of forests and other ecosystems, poisons water tables, and generates vast amounts of toxic waste. Each generates untold social misery to accompany the ecological misery, and a geopolitics just like that of petroleum extraction. One need look no further for an example than the whitewashed coup in Bolivia, which possesses enormous reserves of lithium that the ousted president, Evo Morales, had planned to nationalize.

The other main renewable energy technologies – hydro and biomass – are, when produced at industrial scale, perhaps even more ecologically horrific than mining, leaving dislocated people and destroyed ecosystems. This cannot be what we environmentalists have in mind: to convert Earth’s biota into fuel and her rivers into power plants.

Those who care about this earth, I beg of you: be careful what you ask for. Be careful of making the wrong demands – the too-small demands that actually change nothing and might cause more harm than good. Beware of the go-to solutions that your pressure and your urgency invite. Some of them may be solutions that exacerbate the problem, solutions that are acceptable to established power because they bear no threat to its foundations.

To be sure, fossil fuel extraction wreaks horrible damage to the earth and water, regardless of CO2. Maybe we need to shift the emphasis from carbon – which disallows fossil fuels but allows all kinds of other harm – onto ecocide, which disallows both and sets a new and very different standard for what counts as “green.”

It is time to take a stand for a transition more profound than can be encompassed in carbon metrics. What kind of change is required to know ecocide to be what the word implies – murder?

The deeper causes of climate change are identical to the deeper causes of most of the violence, injustice, and ecological harm on Earth. Some say that cause is capitalism, but the former socialist countries were just as rapacious as capitalist countries, if not more so. I propose that the root cause of ecocide is the world-story of modern civilization. I call it the Story of Separation: the story that holds me separate from you, humanity separate from nature, spirit separate from matter, and soul separate from flesh; that holds full beingness and consciousness to be the exclusive province of the human being, whose destiny is therefore to rise to domination over the mechanical forces of nature to impose intelligence onto a world that has none. The Story of Separation embeds capitalism-as-we-know-it. It scaffolds all of our systems. It mirrors the psychology that has adapted to those systems. Each – story, system, and psychology – perpetuates the others.

The first demand of Extinction Rebellion is that the government tell the truth about climate change, but does it even know the truth? Who is prepared to tell the truth that Earth is alive? That the cause of ecological degradation lies in the deepest stories that civilization tells itself? Who is prepared to tell the truth of what the crisis therefore asks of us – total transformation, an initiation into a new kind of civilization?

3. The Living Planet

A life initiation begins with a crisis that dissolves what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world.

Societies can also undergo initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. It is not a mere “problem” that we can solve from the currently dominant worldview and its solution set, but asks us to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.

A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview. The climate crisis will not be solved by adjusting levels of atmospheric gases, as if we were tinkering with the air-fuel mixture of a diesel engine. Rather, a living Earth can only be healthy – can only stay living in fact – if its organs and tissues are vital. These comprise the forests, the soil, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the fish, the whales, the elephants, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps, and all the rest of Earth’s systems and species. If we continue degrading and destroying them, then even if we cut emissions to zero overnight, Earth will still die a death of a million cuts.

That is because it is life that maintains the conditions for life, through dimly understood processes as complex as any living physiology. Vegetation produces volatile compounds that promote the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight. Megafauna transport nitrogen and phosphorus across continents and oceans to maintain the carbon cycle. Forests generate a biotic pump of persistent low pressure that brings rain to continental interiors and maintains atmospheric flow patterns. Whales bring nutrients up from the deep ocean to nourish plankton. Wolves control deer populations so that forest understory remains viable, enhancing rainfall absorption and preventing droughts and fires. Beavers slow the progress of water from land to sea, buffering floods and modulating silt discharge into coastal waters so that life there can thrive. Migratory birds and fish such as salmon transport marine nutrients inland, sustaining the forests. Mycelial mats tie vast areas together in a neural network exceeding the human brain in its complexity. And all of these processes interlock with each other.

In my book Climate – A New Story I make the case that much of the climate derangement that we blame on greenhouse gases actually comes from direct disruption of ecosystems. It has been happening for millennia: drought and desertification has followed wherever humans have cut down forests and exposed soil to erosion. Wouldn’t it be convenient to blame it all on greenhouse gas emissions, and continue to reproduce our material culture using renewable energy?

At the present writing, Australia is suffering unprecedented catastrophic heat, fire, and drought. Australia has also been clearing trees at the rate of 5,000 square kilometers a year. Again, wouldn’t it be convenient to blame it all on global carbon emissions?

The phrase “disruption of ecosystems” sounds scientific compared to “harming and killing living beings.” But from the Living Planet view, it is the latter that is more accurate. A forest is not just a collection of living trees – it is itself alive. The soil is not just a medium in which life grows; the soil is alive. So is a river, a reef, and a sea. Just as it is a lot easier to degrade, to exploit, and to kill a person when one sees the victim as less than human, so too it is easier to kill Earth’s beings when we see them as unliving and unconscious already. The clearcuts, the strip mines, the drained swamps, the oil spills, and so on are inevitable when we see Earth as a dead thing, insensate, an instrumental pile of resources.

Our stories are powerful. If we see the world as dead, we will kill it. And if we see the world as alive, we will learn how to serve its healing.

* * *

The world is alive. It is not just the host of life. The forests and reefs and wetlands are its organs. The waters are its blood. The soil is its skin. The animals are its cells. This is not an exact analogy, but the conclusion it invites is valid: that if these beings lose their integrity, the whole planet will wither.

I will not try to make an intellectual case for the livingness of planet Earth, which would depend on what definition of life I use. Besides, I’d like to go further and say Earth is sentient, conscious, and intelligent as well – a scientifically insupportable claim. So instead of trying to argue the point, I’ll ask the skeptic to stand barefoot on the earth and feel the truth of it. I believe that however skeptical you are, however fervently you opine that life is just a fortuitous chemical accident driven by blind physical forces, a flame of knowledge burns in every person that earth, water, soil, air, the sun, the clouds, and the wind are alive and aware, feeling us at the same time as we feel them.

I know the skeptic well, because I am he. A creeping doubt takes hold of me when I spend a lot of time indoors, in front of a screen, surrounded by standardized inorganic objects that mirror the deadness of the modernist conception of the world.

Surely the exhortation to connect barefoot with the living Earth would be out of place at an academic climate conference or meeting of the IPCC. Occasionally such events indulge a moment of touchy-feely ceremony or trot out an indigenous person to invoke the four directions before everyone enters the conference room to get down to business, the business of data and graphs, models and projections, costs and benefits. What is real, in that world, is the numbers. Such environments – of quantitative abstractions as well as conditioned air, unvarying artificial light, identical chairs, and ubiquitous right angles – banish any life except the human. Nature exists only in representation, and Earth seems alive only in theory, and probably not at all.

“What is real, in that world, is the numbers.” How ironic, given that numbers are the extremity of abstraction. With problems defined by numbers, the “realistic” mind seeks to solve them by the numbers too. My inner math geek would love to solve the climate crisis by evaluating every possible policy according to its net carbon footprint. Each ecosystem, each technology, each energy project, I would assign a greenhouse value. Then I would order up more of this one and less of that one, offsetting jet travel with tree planting, compensating for wetlands destruction here with solar panels there, to meet a certain greenhouse gas budget. I would apply the methods and mindsets that have grown up around financial accounting – money being another way of reducing the world to numbers. (The world of finance is another place where the numbers are what is real.)

Unfortunately, as with money, carbon reductionism ignores everything that seems not to affect the balance sheet. Thus it is that traditional environmental issues such as wildlife conservation, saving the whales, or cleaning up toxic waste get short shrift in the climate movement. “Green” has come to mean “low-carbon.”

In the Living Planet view this is a huge mistake, since the ignored whales, wolves, beavers, butterflies, and so on are among the organs and tissues that keep Gaia whole. By offsetting our air travel miles with tree planting, sourcing our electricity from solar panels, and thereby donning the mantle of “eco-friendly,” we assuage the conscience while obscuring the ongoing harm that our present way of life entails. We imply that “sustainability” means the sustaining of society as we know it, but with non-fossil fuel sources. That’s why established powers have so easily embraced the climate narrative I call carbon reductionism. Even the fossil fuel companies are OK with it, since it means that they can continue business as usual as long as we implement carbon capture technology and geoengineering.

The real threat to the biosphere is actually worse than most people, even on the left, understand; it includes and far transcends climate, and we can meet it only through a multidimensional healing response. Earth is approaching death by organ failure. We live, in the words of naturalist J.B. MacKinnon, in a “ten percent world,” the poetic statistic he uses to describe the decimation of life on Earth that began with the first mass civilizations and accelerated with the industrial era through to the present day. We have today maybe 10% of the whales that lived before commercial whaling. About 10% of the large predatory fish. Half the Asian mangrove swamps. Twenty percent of the Atlantic seagrass meadows. One percent of North America’s virgin forests, and half the number of trees globally. A 30% decline of birds in my lifetime, and a 50%-80% decline in insects. On and on goes the list.

It would sure be nice to be able to blame all of that on a single cause, i.e. climate change. Then we could operate in the familiar territory of reductionism. We would, in principle, know what to do. When the cause comprises a multitude – herbicides, insecticides, noise pollution, electromagnetic pollution, toxic waste, pharmaceutical residue, land development, soil erosion, over-fishing, forest destruction, aquifer depletion, apex predator elimination, and greenhouse effects, each synergistically interacting with the others – then there is no single solution. Not knowing what to do is uncomfortable. It is tempting to escape into the illusion of a single cause. But not knowing is a lot better than thinking, falsely, that we know.

4. New Priorities

With healthy ecosystems, elevated CO2, methane, and temperature might pose little problem. After all, temperatures were higher than today in the early Holocene as well as during the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, and Medieval Warm Period, and there was no runaway methane feedback loop or anything like that. A living being with strong organs and healthy tissues is resilient.

Sadly, Earth’s organs have been damaged and her tissues have been poisoned. She is in a delicate state. That is why cutting greenhouse emissions is important. However, a Living Planet view invites a different ordering of priorities than the one that conventional climate discourse suggests. Many of them could translate into actionable demands and policies that governments, businesses, and individuals can adopt right now, with tangible, local effects.

First priority is to protect all remaining primary rainforest and other undamaged ecosystems, like native grasslands, coral reefs, mangrove swamps, seagrass meadows, and other wetlands. All pristine ecosystems are precious treasures. They are reservoirs of biodiversity, regeneration hothouses for life. They hold the deep intelligence of the earth, without which full healing is impossible. They are where Gaia’s memory of health remains intact. At the moment of this writing, the Amazon rainforest is under ferocious assault, and the situation in the second-largest rainforest, the Congo, is even worse. The third-largest, New Guinea, is also seriously threatened by logging and palm oil plantations. In the carbon narrative, these places are already important; in the Living Earth narrative, they are vital organs. If the carbon narrative serves their protection, then fine, but we must not propagate the notion that their value is reducible to their carbon storage.

Second priority is to repair and regenerate damaged ecosystems worldwide. Ways to do that include:
– Massive expansion of marine reserves for ocean regeneration
– Bans on bottom trawling, drift nets, and other industrial fishing practices
– Regenerative agricultural practices that rebuild soil, such as cover cropping, perennial agriculture, agroforestry, and holistic grazing
– Afforestation and reforestation
– Water retention landscapes to repair the hydrological cycle
– Reintroduction and protection of keystone species, apex predators, and megafauna

To perform regeneration effectively, we cannot rely on scalable formulas. Each place is unique. What works in one valley or on one farm may not work in the next. When we see the places and ecologies of this planet as living beings and not ensembles of data, we realized the necessity of intimate place-based knowledge. Quantitative science can be part of developing this knowledge, but it cannot substitute for the close, qualitative observation of farmers and other local people who interact with the land every day through generations.

The depth and subtlety of the knowledge of hunter-gatherers and traditional peasants is hard for the scientific mind to fathom. This knowledge, coded into cultural stories, rituals, and customs, integrates its practitioners into the organs of land and sea so that they can participate in the resiliency of life on Earth. Unfortunately, much of what goes under the name of “development” – even sustainable development – undermines their way of life and subsumes them under the global commodity economy. When development means integration into the global economy, the hard currency to repay development loans and import high-tech goods can only come through the export of natural resources, via logging, mining, and commodity agriculture. Thus, the first two priorities require us to reconceive the whole paradigm of development, along with its associated financial system.

Third priority is to stop poisoning the world with pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, plastics, toxic waste, heavy metals, antibiotics, electromagnetic pollution, chemical fertilizers, pharmaceutical residues, radioactive waste, and other industrial pollutants. These weaken Earth on the tissue level, pervading the entire biosphere to the point where, for example, orcas are now found with PCB levels high enough to classify the orca’s body as toxic waste. Neonicotinoid insecticides pervade terrestrial systems, leading to plummeting insect populations and, following them, declines in birds and the rest of the food web. In the oceans, the basis of the food chain – plankton – is under a parallel assault from agricultural runoff, chemical pollution, seismic surveys, and apex predator decimation. The soil in vast agricultural areas is virtually dead, mere dirt, after decades of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Huge tracts of land on different continents are routinely sprayed with insecticides in hopes of controlling disease vectors or invasive species. The earth’s biota is under constant assault.

The fourth priority is to reduce atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. Abrupt changes to atmospheric composition put more stress on global life systems that development, extraction, and pollution have already dangerously weakened. The ecosystems – in particular forests, savannas, and wetlands – that once anchored patterns of flow are severely damaged. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases have intensified the system’s thermodynamic flux, further disrupting atmospheric patterns and further damaging weakened ecosystems. However, even without elevated greenhouse gases, the massive killing of life would spell disaster. Fossil fuel emissions intensify an already bad situation.

If the reader is disturbed by my assigning greenhouse gas reduction to a lowly fourth priority, consider that emission reduction is an inevitable by-product of the other three priorities. For one thing, to truly protect and repair ecosystems would necessitate a moratorium on new pipelines, offshore oil wells, fracking, tar sands excavation, mountaintop removal, strip mines, and other extraction of fossil fuels, as all of these entail severe ecological damage and risk. To love and care for each precious part of this planet, we have to transform the fossil fuel infrastructure regardless of the greenhouse gas issue.

Furthermore, reforestation and regenerative agriculture can sequester massive amounts of carbon. Estimates vary widely as to how much holistic grazing and no-till organic horticulture can sequester, but top practitioners such as Allan Savory, Gabe Brown, and Ernst Gotsch achieve as much as 8-20 tonnes/Ha annually, while also equalling or exceeding conventional growers in terms of productivity, mostly without chemicals. Given that nearly 5 billion hectares of land are under pasture or cultivation globally, transitioning just 10-25% of it to these methods could offset 100% of current global emissions. Granted, not every farmer or rancher is going to immediately equal the success of gifted innovators like Savory, Brown, or Gotsch, but the potential is enormous. Furthermore, global warming skeptics can support these practices too for their beneficial effects on biodiversity, aquifers, and the water cycle. Healthy soil absorbs rainfall like a sponge, mitigating floods, and then via transpiration releases it over time into the air, extending the rainy season and transporting heat from the surface into the atmosphere where more of it radiates into space. Thus, it contributes to cooling and to resiliency in the face of climate change.

Paradoxically, we do not need to deploy the greenhouse argument to reduce greenhouse gases. The priorities listed above suggest a myriad of concrete, achievable goals of protection and regeneration that, added together, could surpass what the climate movement is calling for, but from different motivation. There are significant points of departure, however. The Living Planet approach rejects big hydroelectric projects because they destroy wetlands, degrade rivers, and alter the flow of silt to the sea. It abhors the biofuel plantations that are overtaking vast areas of Africa, Asia, and South America, since these often replace natural ecosystems and small-scale, sustainable peasant agriculture. It dreads geoengineering schemes such such as whitening the sky with sulfur aerosols. It has little use for giant carbon-sucking machines (carbon capture and storage technology). It looks with horror at the consumption of forests around the world to produce wood chips for converted coal-fired power plants. It is doubtful of huge bird-killing wind turbines and vast photovoltaic arrays on denuded landscapes.

To know Earth as alive is a step toward holding it sacred again. It is a step into reverence for all beings. Isn’t that what the climate uprising really wants to be about?

5. Debt and War

Reverence for all beings is the foundation of a revolution of love. Without reverence, we shuffle the cards without changing the game. Victim becomes perpetrator, perpetrator becomes victim, hate hijacks anger, punishment hijacks justice, defeat begets vengeance, and victory begets new enemies.

Reverence animates the four priorities I have outlined, and they do not and cannot stand apart from other dimensions of global healing. Any issue of social, political, economic, racial, or sexual justice – any restoration of the full humanity of those who have been stripped of it – would be at home among them, not as politically correct add-ons, but as structural components of the same edifice. None can stand without the others. Among these, however, there are two I would like to promote to special status, because they set the tone and template for all the others: debt, and war.

Imagine you are a country, say Ecuador. The world community comes to you in the form of a man waving an Earth flag and says, “Protect your rainforests! Protect your rivers, your wetlands, and your soil! The fate of the world depends on it.” Then he puts down the flag and pulls out a gun, puts it to your head, and adds, “However, you must keep the debt payments flowing,” knowing full well that the only way you can do that is by liquidating precisely those rainforests, rivers, wetlands, and soil. Refuse, and the punishment is swift. The international bond market abandons you. Your currency crashes. Transnational corporations and their nation-state allies regime-change you. The new government, celebrated as “democratic,” institutes austerity, removes barriers to ecological pillage, and is rewarded with yet more development loans.

None of this is happening due to the wickedness of bankers, deep state bureaucrats, military imperialists, or the cabal of illuminati and reptilian ETs that run world affairs behind the scenes. It is happening to serve a systemic necessity for economic growth. A monetary system based on interest-bearing debt requires endless growth to function, and generates endless pressure on all its participants to do something, anything, to bring more of nature into the realm of products and property, and more of relationship into the realm of services.

I was (sort of) joking about the reptilian ETs. It would sure be nice to identify something, or someone, we could battle and dominate to save the world. Conquering evil is the oldest solution in the book, a seductive solution, a false solution which veils complexity and mutes the discomfort of not knowing what do to. But if evil were in charge of the world, all it would have to do is install an interest-based money system, sit back, and watch mayhem ensue.

My book Sacred Economics is one of many that describe what must change for economy to rejoin ecology. A post-growth economics is possible that understands progress in terms other than growth, and wealth in terms other than quantity. For now, I will just mention a first step toward it, something we might, someday soon, demand: large-scale debt cancelation. Debt is familiar to every tube rider, and it is central to the functioning of the world-consuming growth machine.

The growth machine extends market relationships into every corner of life. In a market relationship, each party tries to get the best deal, while other beings become instruments of its own self-interest. The relational baseline is therefore one of hostility. Debt in particular is a form of power-over; as David Graeber says, behind the man with the ledger always stands a man with a gun.

The separation and domination inherent in debt-based economic relations takes extreme form in the phenomenon of war. The war industry consumes vast amounts of money, energy, and material, but the greater threat to the future lies in the fracturing of collective human will. To shift course toward world healing will require solidarity and coherency of purpose. If our creative energies and life forces are used up fighting each other, what will be left to enact this mighty transition? Our ship has been seized by a whirlpool. Maybe, if everyone pulls on the oars, we can escape it; instead, the crew fight each other on the deck as the ship careens toward its doom.

As long as war in all its forms rages upon this planet, none of the four Living Planet priorities will ever come to pass. When reverence is the source of the revolution, then the real revolutionary is the peace worker. War thinking generates a psychic climate inhospitable to reverence, because it dehumanizes the enemy and excludes from the circle of empathy any being that gets in the way of the war effort. Just so, modern economy has objectified nature and excluded from the circle of empathy any being that gets in the way of profit.

War thinking extends far beyond military conflict. Today’s intense political polarization is another of its expressions. Division into opposing camps, dehumanization of the other side, association of moral virtue with the war effort, belief that the solution to our problems will come through victory – all are hallmarks of war. If your political strategy is to inflame the public over the inexcusable, reprehensible people in politics, corporations, or the police, you are waging a war. If you believe the people on the other side are less moral, less ethical, less conscious, or less spiritual than you, you are on the verge of war. So yes, expose the actions that are killing the world. But do not attribute them to the perfidy of the actors, and do not imagine that firing the actors will change the roles.

6. Polarization and Denial

Earlier I referred to the controversial claim that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present. I would like to revisit that, not because I think it is important to establish one way or another, but because it offers a window onto the aforementioned deeper problem of polarization, which freezes our culture into a holding pattern on practical every important issue, not just climate change.

Hockey stick reconstructions seem to show that today is warmer than any time in the past ten thousand years. On the other hand, skeptics assail the methodological and statistical underpinnings of these studies, and adduce evidence of early warm temperatures such as higher sea levels in the early and middle Holocene, and treelines hundreds of kilometers north of where they are today.

After several years of book research I am confident I could argue either side of the issue. I could, with extensive citations, argue that the Medieval Warm Period (now called the Medieval Temperature Anomaly) was not really that warm after all, and in any event mostly concentrated in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean basin. I could also argue, again citing dozens of peer-reviewed papers, that the anomaly was significant and global. The same goes for pretty much every aspect of the climate debate – I can argue either side well enough to satisfy its partisans.

Already the reader’s hackles might be up that I’m implying an equivalency between the two sides, one of which consists of unscrupulous corporate-funded right-wing pseudo-scientists who let their greed come before humanity’s survival, and the other of humble scientists of integrity backed by self-correcting institutions of peer review that ensure that the consensus position of science approaches ever closer to the truth. Or is it that one side consists of brave dissidents who risk their careers to question the reigning orthodoxy, and the other of groupthinking, risk-averse careerists beholden to the globalist agenda of rabid left-wing “enviros” and “greenies”?

The polarizing invective coming from both sides suggests a high degree of ego investment in their positions and makes me doubt that either side would countenance evidence that contradicts their view. They cannot even agree on what constitutes a fact. Each of the many sides, which range from catastrophist to alarmist to skeptical, seems to occupy its own reality tunnel. Subjecting any contradicting information to hostile scrutiny, each accepts with little question anything that reinforces its own position. Therefore, whichever side is wrong is unlikely ever to find that out. And that, dear reader, includes your side!

In the face of the extreme polarization of Western society today, I’ve adopted a rule of thumb which applies as much to warring couples as it does to politics: the most important issue is to be found outside the fight itself, in what both parties tacitly agree on or refuse to see. To take sides is to validate the terms of the debate, and to keep hidden issues hidden. What do all sides unconsciously agree on? What is taken for granted? What questions are not being asked? Could the ferocity of the debate be obscuring something more important which really needs our attention?

A meta-level tacit agreement in the climate debate is the reduction of the question of planetary health to the question of whether the planet is warming due to greenhouse gases. By pinning alarm over ecological deterioration onto global warming, we imply that if the skeptics are right, then there is no cause for alarm. In the Living Earth paradigm, there is cause for alarm, regardless of which side is right. Beholden to the runaway warming narrative, however, the climate movement must prove the skeptics wrong at all costs – even to the point of excluding evidence of historical warm temperatures, since these do not fit the narrative.

The alarmist camp is channeling into warming an authentic alarm at the anthropogenic deterioration of the biosphere, and the human condition that drives it. Something is indeed horribly wrong; something that implicates everything. Unfortunately, the environmental movement has largely accepted runaway global warming as a proxy for the all-pervading wrongness that is the true object of its dissent. In so doing, I fear that it has ceded sacred ground and agreed to stage the fight on difficult terrain. It has substituted a hard sell for an easy sell. It has substituted a fear narrative (the costs of climate change) for a love narrative (save the precious forests). It has preconditioned care for the earth on the acceptance of a politically charged theory that requires trust in the institution of science along with the systems of authority that embed it. This, at a time when overall trust in authority is, with good reason, on the wane.

As for the skeptics, I am afraid that the “denialist” slur is in many cases accurate. Whether or not there are valid criticisms to be made of establishment climate science, the skeptical position typically is part of a larger political identity that, in order to maintain its solvency, must dismiss every environmental problem along with global warming. Hewing to a position that all is well, climate skeptic blogs usually insist that plastic waste, radioactive waste, chemical pollutants, biodiversity loss, electromagnetic pollution, GMOs, pesticides, etc. are not a problem either; therefore, nothing needs to change.

Fearful of the profound change that is upon us, the climate skeptics are only the most obvious deniers. Perversely, the global warming mainstream perpetuates a kind of denial too, by upholding a vision of sustainability attainable merely by switching energy sources. The common oxymoron of “sustainable growth” exemplifies this delusion, as growth in our time entails the conversion of nature into resource, into product, into money.

Perversely, the dominant global warming narrative facilitates denialism by shifting alarm onto a defeasible scientific theory whose ultimate proof can only come when it is too late. With effects that are distant in space and time, and causally distant as well, it is much easier to deny climate change than it is to deny, say, that whale hunting kills whales, that deforestation dries up the land, that plastic is killing marine life, and so forth. By the same token, the effects of place-based ecological healing are easier to see than the climate effects of photovoltaic panels or wind turbines. The causal distance is shorter, and the effects more tangible. For example, where farmers practice soil regeneration, the water table begins to rise, springs that were dry for decades come back to life, streams begin flowing year round again, and songbirds and wildlife return. One can see all of this without needing to trust the pronouncements of scientific authorities.

Furthermore, while the sincerity and intelligence of most individual scientists is beyond doubt, as an institution science is subject to a collective confirmation bias that has repeatedly led it astray. Witness the recent collapse of two longstanding, nearly universally-accepted orthodoxies: (1) that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat cause arteriosclerosis, and (2) that evolution happens solely through random mutation and natural selection. (This was unquestionable dogma until horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, and gene self-editing were accepted.) The public’s distrust in scientific authority may not be entirely unjustified, particularly when science, later revealed to be faulty, has so often been invoked to assure us of the safety of pesticides, GMOs, cell phone towers, and various toxic pharmaceutical drugs. That is not to say climate science is wrong; it is to caution against relying on public acceptance of it, when such acceptance is unnecessary from the Living Earth paradigm. The elites tacitly ascribe public resistance to science to irrationality and ignorance, offering patronizing remedies to correct them. Is the take-home lesson of climate change “We should have trusted the scientists”? “We should have listened to teacher”? “We should have believed what authority told us was true”?

Many on the Left hold science (as an institution) to be the last redoubt of sanity in an otherwise degenerate culture, a bulwark against a rising tide of irrationality. What if it is just as flawed as our other institutions? If it is dethroned as the final arbiter of right and wrong, how would we know ourselves as members of Team Good, and self-identify as the light-bearers of reason in a crusade against an ignorance that threatens the very world?

This is not a call to abandon science, but rather to return to its sacred source: humility. Freed of its institutional ossification, science would likely overturn many of the established dogma that its evangelists proclaim as unassailable truths. I am not the only one who has had experiences that science says are impossible nonsense, who has benefitted from healing modalities that science says are quackery, or who has lived in cultures where scientifically unacceptable phenomena were commonplace. This is not to say that the standard narrative of global warming is wrong. I don’t know that at all. It is just that I don’t know that it is right either. What I think is that it is hugely incomplete. That is why I have turned my attention to what I do know, starting with the knowledge that comes through my own bare feet.

That knowledge is the knowledge that Earth is alive. From the Living Earth view rise policies and actions that make sense whichever side of the climate debate is right.

7. Extinction and Purpose

The Living Planet view acknowledges an intimate link between human and ecological affairs. I often hear people say, “Climate change is not a threat to Earth. The planet will be fine. It is only human beings that might go extinct.” If we understand humanity, however, as the beloved creation of Gaia, born for an evolutionary purpose, then we could no more say she will be fine without humans as we could say a mother will be fine if she loses her child. I’m sorry, but she will not be fine.

The aforementioned idea of an evolutionary purpose, while contrary to modern biological science, follows naturally from a view of the world and the cosmos as sentient, intelligent, or conscious. It opens the question, “Why are we here?” and even, “Why am I here?” Gaia has grown a new organ. What is it for? How might humanity cooperate with all the other organs – the forests and the waters and butterflies and the seals – in service to the dream of the world?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I only know that we must start asking them. We must – and not as a matter of survival. Whether as individuals or as a species, we live for something, and if we neglect it then vitality, aliveness, ebbs away. We are not given life merely to survive it.

We are not given life merely to survive it. No organism on Earth merely survives. Each offers gifts to the whole. That’s why an ecosystem becomes weaker when any species is removed from it. Through the lens of pure competition, a species should be better off when its competitor is extinguished, but in fact it is worse off. Again, life creates the conditions for life. By this principle, humans are here to render gifts to the rest of life too; we are here to serve life. We as a civilization have long done the opposite. Nothing less than a total revolution of love, a great turning, will therefore suffice.

Accordingly, movements like Extinction Rebellion cannot, at their root, be about human survival. Its rhetoric speaks of irreversible tipping points, methane feedback loops, twelve years before it is too late, but I refuse to believe that this is what it is about. As I wrote earlier, if global temperatures stopped rising, the rebellious urgency would be no less.

The following scenario demonstrates vividly that the object of our struggle is not actually human survival. A more dreadful possibility lurks behind the proxy fear of extinction. Suppose we are able to continue converting Earth into a giant parking lot, strip mine, and waste dump. Suppose we replace soil with hydroponic farms and vat-grown meat cell cultures. Suppose we migrate our lives entirely into climate-controlled indoor spaces. Suppose we develop space mirrors, carbon-sucking machines, and sky-bleaching chemicals to control global temperatures. Suppose we continue on the course of the last ten thousand years, in which each generation leaves the planet a little less alive than the previous one. And suppose that, as for the last ten thousand years, humanity continues to grow in its measurable wealth. I call this scenario the concrete world, in which nature has completely died, replaced by technology, and we seem hardly to notice as we plug into nature’s artificial digital replacement. Here, the extinction is not of humanity, it is of everything else. I ask you, Is that an acceptable future?

The climate movement has made human survival into the main issue. That is a mistake. Here are three reasons why: (1) It reinforces the valuing of nature for its use to human beings, which is the same mindset that has long facilitated its despoliation. (2) Whether or not it will continue to be true, experience has so far shown us that humans will survive just fine as the rest of life dies – more and more of ourselves, less and less of everything else. (3) It is dishonest to make the issue human survival, when that isn’t really what motivates us. Suppose human survival on a dead world were guaranteed – would we breathe a sigh of relief and join the ecocide?

Extinction Rebellion is (or should be) about what kind of world we want to live in. It is about who we want to be. It is about why we are here and what we serve. It is about turning and standing in service to all life.

Why would we want to serve life? Unlike self-preservation, that desire can only come from love.

Let let us consider one more dimension of extinction. Above I posed a scenario in which nature dies while humanity survives. To even state this, though, implies the separability of humanity and nature. In fact, we are inseparable; we are nature’s expression. Therefore, we cannot actually be “just fine” when the rest of life is dying. It is not necessarily that we cannot survive as the rest die. It is that with each extinction, with every ecosystem and place and species that passes, something of ourselves dies as well. With the shriveling of our relations, we become less whole. We might continue to progress in GDP, in miles traveled, in years lived, in floor space and AC units per capita, in educational attainment, in total consumption, in terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes, yet these endlessly swelling quantities will only mask and distract from a ravening spiritual hunger for all the things they have displaced: connection and belonging, a familiar birdsong that is a little different each time, the smell of spring, the swelling of the buds, the taste of a sun-drenched raspberry, the grandfathers telling stories of a place that the children know well too. With each step into an isolation chamber of our own making, so sharpens our suffering. We see already the symptoms of extinction in ourselves, in rising rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction, self-harm, domestic violence, and other forms of misery that no amount of material wealth can assuage.

In other words, the depletion of life on earth accompanies a depletion of our souls. As we destroy beings, we destroy our own beingness. No longer enmeshed in a web of intimate, mutual relationships, no longer participating in life around us, surrounded by contained, dead things, we become less alive ourselves. We become zombies, wondering why we feel so dead inside. This is the ultimate source of the protests. We yearn to recover life. We want to overturn the Age of Separation.

What do we serve? What vision of beauty beckons us? This is the question we must ask as we pass through the initiatory portal we call climate change. In asking it, we summon a collective vision that nucleates a common story, a common agreement. I do not think the story will be the old future of flying cars, robot servants, and bubble cities overlooking a befouled and barren landscape. It will be a future where the beaches are profuse with seashells again, where we see whales by the thousands, where flocks of birds stretch horizon to horizon, where the rivers run clean, and where life has returned to the ruined places of today.

How do we attain to such a future? I do not know, but I can say this: because the cause of the ecological crisis is everything, the solution involves everything too. All healing is part of Earth healing. If we are to issue demands, or perhaps instead, invitations, let us broaden them to include all in need of healing, even and especially those who seem not important: the prisoners, the destitute, the marginalized, the neglected places and people. Humanity is an organ of Gaia too, and Earth will never be healthy if civilization is not. The social climate, the political climate, the relational climate, the psychic climate, and the global climate are inseparable. A society that exploits the most vulnerable people will necessarily exploit the most vulnerable places too. A society that wages war on other people will, conditioned to violence, surely wreak the same upon the earth. A society that dehumanizes some of its members will always devalue nonhuman beings as well. And a society devoted to healing on one level, inevitably will come to serve healing on every level.

Any act of healing, however small, is a prayer, a declaration of how the world shall be. Can we connect with our love for this hurting, living planet, and channel that love through our hands and minds, our technology and our arts, as we ask, How shall we best participate in the healing and the dreaming of Earth?



Previous: Klimawandel – ein größerer Zusammenhang
Next: Wir brauchen eine Revolution der Liebe – eine ganzheitliche Betrachtung zum Klimawandel (transkript)

Filed Under: Ecology & Earth Healing, Political & Social Tagged With: activism, Climate, climate change, Essay, Featured Essay

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jeff says

    January 31, 2020 at 11:16 am

    Great essay and summative expression of your over all vision. Thanks again for the inspiration. In my own small way I am promoting the goal of ecological civilization and culture to my middle school and high school students at the public charter school I work at. I told them yesterday their generation’s mission is to heal the earth.

  2. dennis okeefe says

    February 4, 2020 at 7:35 pm

    The crisis is clearly beyond mankind’s ability to solve. It needs divine intervention but what to do with a humanity that has no faith in a sacred dimension to life? In fact, like an addict, when the bottom is hit, man in desperation will finally take that turn back toward “home”. Then and only then can regeneration begin.

  3. Elisabet Sahtouris, Phd Evolutionbiologist & futurist says

    February 4, 2020 at 9:11 pm

    Aloha, Charles,
    Agree with most of what you say and laud you for saying it! Just puzzled by the apparent contradiction of saying we cannot stop the current econ/pol system but yet ask us to call for bans on the further exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems on which it depends. That seems to say we CAN stop the machine by preventing its expansion, which, by your own logic would stop it.
    Glad you recognize how debt money forces the relentless expansion and consequent social destruction, but then say nothing about the growth of alternative currencies that can counter and gradually replace debt money (at least locally) without attacking it. So many working hard on that! I would add (to ending debt money) another thing not doable now, but could happen in a better future: NO land ownership; only leases demanding stewardship.
    As for the Living Earth, you make no mention of all this concept’s pioneers, making it sound like a new discovery. Happy you endorse Savory’s work: he quotes me as calling humans a desert-making specie.
    On Climate Change: yes, there were mini hot and ice ages from Roman through Renaissance times; Earth fluctuates that way. In the 1980’s Jim Lovelock told me to pray for the real Ice Age more or less due because we were in danger of flipping Earth into a real Hot Age. Personally, I accept the evidence that the latter is happening and unstoppable now (Earth has done them before); that adaptation is the best we can hope for as we do all the things you cite as good in this article. Even if the bulk of humanity does not survive, I believe enough will if we say YES to reverence for Nature; taking Her as our guide and teacher as in all of my own writings; uniting economy into ecology to bring about an Ecosophy: the Wise Society.

  4. Linda J says

    February 4, 2020 at 9:49 pm

    Much to chew on here, but it largely rings very true to me. Keep it up, Charles.

  5. Erlank says

    February 4, 2020 at 10:46 pm

    At the foundation of human beingness, the origin thought, the way of expressing into life, is a fundamental error. Teaching and dominating via ‘toxic shame’, from the first moments of life and subsequent control and teaching. We initiate and perpetuate the foundation culture, certainly in the west and all that we have touched, through religion and media programming, via fear based shaming as part of the teaching and controlling of the youth, i.e. next generation. Each generation building on the last. This is the base plan, the fundamental issue that if resolved, restores all others. Only then will universal love energy be able to express. All else is bandaids and politicking. If the foundation is love all else is love. And no harm can be done to the other, planet, earth, people, animals, all life is sacred. It starts at home. Nowhere else.

  6. Nancy says

    February 5, 2020 at 12:09 am

    I am writing! Even as I doubt my ability.
    Here is a current draft.
    https://medium.com/@npeden/my-revolutionary-journey-to-the-holism-of-love-8dbd6d3ce2ad

  7. Michael says

    February 5, 2020 at 12:53 am

    Powerful essay. I rarely find formulations of thought I am in such complete agreement and alignment with. One of my teachers called this civilization “the way of Separation” and I have found this to be very useful as an organizing principle, the truth of which has only deepened as I’ve gotten older. It is great to hear someone else come across this broad idea. I further appreciate the distinctions you have made regarding climate change approaches, and the importance of addressing the debt-based banking system driving the chaos. I have followed your work for a while, and appreciate the continued deepening.

    I would say the next aspect that this essay leads to is HOW to get one’s personal economics in alignment with this. I have been actively pursuing Contribution Economics for years now (a k a Gandhi’s Parallel Structures, a k a Counter Economics, a k a Permaculture, a k a…) And still the money runs out before the returns on the service work scale up, and I end up getting some job to restart the cash-flow. In the past year, I also acquired debt in order to pay for holistic health care – expensive but absolutely needed – after falling through the system due to a work accident and lousy workers’ comp coverage, etc. Rents are also outrageous most places now. I bring this up not to personalize this, but because for any of the broader changes to take place, we need to be able to take care of ourselves and our basic needs. And for many of us, this has been a decades-long catch-22. Blessings and Gratitude!

    • Susan Butler says

      February 6, 2020 at 2:09 pm

      Back in the early 70s I lived in a way close to what I think Michael would like: I joined a California open land commune, built my own one-room house out of salvage lumber and windows, and got on food stamps for income, which we called “federal grants in experimental ways of living.” I lived comfortably on $28/month in stamps because we had gardens, milk cows, chickens, and seafood from the sea, as well as wood for the stove. We shared what vehicles there were, and did the repairs ourselves. I was young and middle-class and was surprised by how little I missed luxuries like plumbing and electricity. (This was before the internet.) I had what I valued the most, freedom. I had plenty of friends around me and was part of a very exciting and creative social movement pursuing the values I cared about in a powerful way.
      We can do this again. The closest mainstream thing today would be something between a co-housing community and a campground. Both of these are happening scenes already, and there are still intentional communities very similar to what I experienced scattered across the globe. It’s way cheaper to live in shared situations of many kinds, and better for people in many other ways too. One problem is our culture of violence that makes it hard for us to get along with each other. Non-violent communication was put forward by Marshall Rosenberg back in the 60s; and today, so many years later, is on the cutting edge of “experimental ways of living” in my view. We have to learn to get together now, smile on your brother, and love one another right now.

      • Mike says

        February 18, 2020 at 2:57 am

        🙂 And thanks for yours!

  8. Larry Gioannini says

    February 5, 2020 at 8:54 am

    The solution is in the making; reduction of the human population to that which can be maintained sustainably. It might be managed to minimize suffering by reducing the fertility rate but most likely it will be catastrophic. The above essay deals with secondary aspects of the primary problem of overpopulation.

  9. John-Michael says

    February 5, 2020 at 2:19 pm

    Wow, Charles, talk about a beauty-love-truth bomb/balm! Feeling the full range of the call, bro!

    As for next steps, a group conversational process? An invitation to envision that new world? A means of developing post-separation values and operating principles within a connected feedback system? A discussion of a transitional economic system, given all of your recommendations (and any others that could be made) have economic considerations underlying them?

  10. Ben Ward says

    February 6, 2020 at 6:50 am

    Love the line. “The more we douse ourselves in the perfume of virtue, the more we give off the stench of sanctimony.”

  11. Chris Wilson says

    February 6, 2020 at 11:35 am

    I haven’t been studying the situation for as long or in such depth as you have, but I’m in complete agreement, including the way you write about scientific ‘truth’. Your ‘concrete future’ scenario (where we abandon Nature and simulate bits of it artificially) sounds & feels to me very much like the scenario that Rudolf Steiner envisaged 100 years ago in his lectures on Lucifer and Ahriman, the ‘twin devils’, one of Light, the other of Darkness. His vision of Ahriman was that this cosmic Being would make us become so fascinated by our own ability to manipulate the material world, that we might forget our spiritual roots altogether and be dragged down into an impenetrable spiritual darkness. The transcripts of these lectures, in a book called Lucifer and Ahriman, are still available from the Steiner Book Centre, if you haven’t come across it I would recommend a read.

  12. Linda says

    February 6, 2020 at 5:57 pm

    Dear Charles,
    Thank you for reminding me, again and again, of the more beautiful world my heart knows is possible.
    Please continue, I am listening. My heart is opening. My eyes are seeing. My hands are working the soil. I am beginning to heal.

  13. Richard Welker says

    February 8, 2020 at 4:06 pm

    Charles has added a much needed layer to the dialogue. The example below is why I think he is correct about the revolution is love.

    Last night in Santa Fe, NM, 60 people attended an emergency meeting of the southside community. An asphalt company has filed a State permit application to move part of their facility from one side of the highway to the other where they have an existing plant, thereby merging their divided operation. The permit would give them more hours to operate, especially at night when most roads are paved. It would also streamline their operation.

    The area where this operation is located is adjacent to a low to mid income residential area with many children, schools and working families. The residents are deeply concerned that they are increasingly becoming a sacrifice zone for expanding industrial activity: toxic fumes, increased truck traffic, gravel spills, water and air quality degradation, diminished land values, and environmental racism.

    The asphalt company is heavily contracted with the city and county to pave streets. They argue that everyone needs roads and that in consolidating the operation, they will save money, reduce emissions and actually decrease net operations. They say their dispersion computer models show that they will not only be in compliance with local, county, state and EPA guidelines but that when measured from their fence line, on average, toxic emissions will be well below EPA “Standard.”

    In an effort to justify their consolidation to the alarmed residents, the asphalt company presented a difficult-to -see slide show of projections, graphs, relocation charts, air quality dispersion models and compliance data. They indicateed the tacit support of the State Environmental Department and presented a line of 5 or 6 state bureaucrats responsible for processing the more than 100-page permit.

    The meeting boiled down to this: “We” the asphalt company are justified in going ahead because we are in complete compliance with all regulations which we have just shown with our presentation. We are even moving our operation slightly further away from the residences, paving the roads to keep down dust and getting rid of our messy generators to go on line power.

    “WE” the community, on the other hand, are deeply suspicious of the EPA , the state and their notoriously inadequate standards and enforcement. We smell the asphalt fumes, get headaches, have witnessed the dangerously driven semi’s spilling gravel on the roads, and don’t trust assurances that “YOU” the company, won’t wind up producing more emissions than you do now. We are concerned about our property values cut in half. We have lodged numerous complaints in the past that never get addressed despite assurances by the state that they must comply with the “standards.” and remediate immediately any violations. We feel alarmed that the company hasn’t addressed the slightest concern for our health because when we suggest they use the latest technology to capture toxic gasses, the company says that it will drive them out of business. Anyway, they say it isn’t required. The community wants the company to find some other place to put their activity.

    The state and the company respond that despite growing residential development on the southside, the land adjacent is zoned industrial and there are no other places to put the company operations. Essentially, if permitted, the community is simply going to have to live with the asphalt companies operation.

    This issue, like so many others we now face, represents the fact that our civilization has collided with itself in a hopelessly irreconcilable conflict. Every one has cars and needs roads. Roads are made of asphalt, which is made by heating extracted oil and mixing it with crushed rock, giving off toxic fumes.

    Everyone also needs clean air, water, and sanctuary, a space free from dangerous machinery. But in our industrial based society, our life is increasing incompatible with the way we provide for our life. Thus, in one meeting, there is a split, a separation, the battle lines are drawn and a hopeless gap develops between the two polarities. There is anger, fear and blame. Suddenly, it is the corporation versus the community. Conflict metabolizes into war. But the truth is, we are all in this together.

    This is to me, exactly the conundrum that the Revolution is Love is trying to articulate. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t read the essay. Very profound indeed.

  14. John Clancy says

    February 9, 2020 at 6:17 pm

    In the beginning of this essay, Charles suggests that the language of demand may be inappropriate for bringing the More Beautiful World into being. By issuing demands that can’t be fulfilled because they require the dismantling of the basic structures of our society and the basic way we relate to life we make those in power into enemies when the demands go unfulfilled. Shortly thereafter, Charles stated the four priorities that we “should” take in order to abandon ecocide and social injustice and embrace regeneration and equality. I wondered how he was going to resolve this possible conflict. He did so, I think, when he suggested the word “invite” instead of “demand.” And though this may seem a distinction without a difference as well as wishful thinking, it reminded me of the oft told story of the mother seagull. Her eggs had been taken by the ocean on the outgoing tide. She so loved her children that she started emptying the ocean, one beak full at a time. All the other birds told her she had begun an impossible task, but the mother kept at it. Her love-fueled persistence inspired other birds to help her; soon there were many. The king and queen of the birds took notice, then the ocean took notice and returned the mother’s eggs to shore. I believe there are many avenues, including political ones, to manifesting the more beautiful words. I pray that all such actions become invitations to all.

  15. Newton Finn says

    February 13, 2020 at 3:20 pm

    I think that Charles and his readers/listeners will appreciate this excerpt from William James about a once-famous, now forgotten scientist/philosopher who, at the beginning of the 19th Century, also experienced and explained (to the extent that it can be explained) the living reality of Gaia.

    http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/william-james-on-fechner/

  16. Carlos B says

    February 16, 2020 at 7:56 am

    As part of a local XR group in Spain I listen to Charles words I can’t but she that we should move the focus from expecting the Government to take action to creating the sociopolitical conditions that make that action unavoidable for the power structures not to lose all legitimacy.

    We need new texts, novels, fairytales, movies, series, parties, festivals, clubs, sports, cultural events and any human culture manifestation to support and deepen the new story, contributing to create the conditions to make the necessary changes.

    Let’s start with what we have influence on: our friends, our family, our school, our colleagues, etc.

    Let’s reach out for allies that help us feel sane and craft new spaces where we can all meet, one open hearts, share our minds, making this epic mission not only bearable but a nice and fun one.

    Let me end with a reminder that we can only do this TOGETHER!

  17. Carlos B says

    February 16, 2020 at 8:00 am

    Dear Moderator,

    Please edit my last comment and replace she with share.

    Thanks!

  18. Prof. Rupert Read says

    February 18, 2020 at 11:48 am

    Charles; this is an excellent and important piece. It makes some really good points of gentle critique and offers a fascinating frame through which to re-view XR.
    There are however, as I see it, some problems with it that I’d like to draw to your attention:

    >Your creation of a kind of equivalence between climate-deniers and climate-scientists is not legitimate. [This is also the main problem I have with your book on Climate.] I work alongside the world’s leading climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia. There is simply no comparison between them and the thuggish rabble of truth-allergic deniers who have tried to make their (and my) lives a misery, and who nearly drove my colleague Phil Jones to suicide.

    >I don’t see your piece acknowledging the importance of a precautionary approach: such an approach already gives us most of what we need, without our having to rely excessively on the details of climate-science, a reliance which you attack. See e.g. https://fooledbyrandomness.com/climateletter.pdf .

    You misrepresent XR in some significant ways:

    >XR does NOT, unlike most previous movements, slag off individuals for not being virtuous enough; we do not do blaming and shaming, but we instead take precisely the kind of system-change approach that you want to recommend, an approach upon/according-to which we are all in this together. (See e.g. 1-3 minutes into this: https://youtu.be/hTY3W0dbq_s ).

    >You don’t seem aware that XR >isYour criticism of anthropocentrism in ‘the climate movement’ is on one level quite justified, but on another level risks being ignorant of the need, if we are to appeal to more of the ‘iceberg’ of our potential support than just 3.5%, to appeal to a broad swathe of people some of whom are not much moved by nature or non-human animals. Some of this swathe ought to be / can be activated by appealing to their and their kids’ vulnerability. That isn’t an objectionable anthropocentrism; it’s just a pragmatism in the face of the emergency. It’s how we become broad-based and escape an activist ghetto. See e.g. https://vimeo.com/389093326 for THIS new story.

    >Your beautiful widening of the lens to encompass all that we care about and the deep level at which the paradigm surely needs changing is music to my ears, and to Dee’s I bet, and to many others. BUT it risks obscuring the sense in which, in order to be an effective emergency-response, XR needs to be broad-based, and cannot risk relying focally on the call for spiritual transformation. I am right with you in that call [I’ll be teaching a course at Schumacher College, with Dee, in May], but again if we insist on such a spiritual approach from all in our movement, then our movement will fail. We need rather to build an overlapping consensus of those who are in this for a variety of reasons: a movement of movements. [See e.g. https://www.vladvexler.com/conversation-w-rupert-read-of-extinction-rebellion/ for some detail on this.]

    Only then will we have a real chance of reaching critical mass.

    Hope you find these thoughts and reactions (and links etc) useful; naturally I’d love to dialogue on them.

    With thanks again for your powerful and much-needed voice; Rupert Read.

  19. Bruce Bisset says

    February 23, 2020 at 7:30 pm

    on balance i can’t decide if this is subtly nuanced denialism or just slightly confused pontification. certainly it would present as a sounder argument if you understood what XR was actually about, Charles, before you start slagging it. look up regenerative culture, eg.

  20. Larry CHRISTENSEN says

    March 6, 2020 at 11:02 pm

    Hi Charles.
    I agree with much of what you write about especially seeing the source of our global and personal problems as believing in the story of separation that the universe evolved for us. It’s not our fault but now is our responsibility. This is an enormous problem to change and even if we save the climate/earth from changing so much that humans are no longer alive this issue in universal consciousness will continue as life continues to change and grow. Our efforts to change this separation believe should be at the heart of our efforts even if we don’t make it. That is because all of life is based in consciences and what is learned is never forgotten. What we learn together, and not just intellectually but more importantly experientially, is far more important that wether humans survive. We are life and life/universe will always survive since it never was born, never absent.

  21. Mia Manners says

    March 13, 2020 at 4:34 am

    Dearest Charles,
    I grimaced for a moment, in fear, that you had become some part of the problem and not the solution….I once pushed for all things to be concrete in terms of saving the rain forests, eating organic, local and seasonal, running my own ‘Green’ consultancy…then something happened, and i realised I was part of the problem, and needed to do the work on Who Am I…I opposed XR for many reasons, least of all, the fighting aspect against the plebs…And now this essay has given me so much…a Healing , and a Big Remembering as to why life on earth is as much a part of all intracellular energetic systems of All universal aspects, bridging our divinity as children here in this dimension…You are a very wise man…

  22. Brittany Renee Martinez says

    March 26, 2020 at 9:15 pm

    This is a WHOLE truth. Like a ripe apple. My heart, mind, and body all melted together in the delight of this reading. What mastery to step outside of the fray and look into the conflict from a new dimension of understanding. This is the work of the prophet. To see the whole tapestry from a distance, while living the story on the cloth. Blessed be, Charles. May the gods carry your message on wings to all those fertile souls ready to hear this truth. May it bring healing and transformation to our collective consciousness. May you be blessed for your courage and your faith.

  23. Barbara Vaile says

    March 31, 2020 at 9:20 am

    And here we are with the Covid-19 prompt to be local. Reclaim our attention. Time to think our own thoughts . . . about how this is improving our balance and how to best be with our precious personal energy..
    Has anyone else been concerned that we are the only life form that does not feed itself — that we have organized systems on Earth to deliver to our mouths our bites?
    We have managed to imperil most of all other life — we are living in a 10% world Charles says above.
    If we all get better at loving right at home . . . Earth will heal. Keeping in mind that we are in it together. A moratorium on wars begun over drought and famine. . . Debt forgiveness. Love is the energy of the universe.
    My mantra: There is enough for all to share.

  24. Danny Shelton says

    May 1, 2020 at 1:29 pm

    An interesting and useful read with many useful points. However, I have to say that I think you have misrepresented or misunderstood some of the core concerns and approaches taken by the majority of XR members. It feels like you may have spent a very small amount of time with members or at an action, and a much larger amount of time looking at how it has been viewed from a distance. As others have already commented a central focus of all XR objectives is the support and growth of a regenerative culture. I am yet to meet a member who does not understand this as a central requirement for any sort of meaningful transformation that will address the multiple planetary issues that we face. There is also a very widespread understanding that this is not simply a carbon issue but a relational issue. Your articulation of the separation narrative may not be replicated with the same level of elegance across the movement but it is without doubt fundamentally understood by a huge majority of members.

    The chosen methods of interaction are imperfect as we live in and are part of an imperfect world, but again I think you misunderstand the focus on extinction; you paint it as an anthropocentric concern but again this is not at all reflective of my personal experience with members of XR. All of the members I have stood with and worked with understand that there is so much more being lost at this very moment. Saying that the movement is overly concerned with the utilitarian value of Earth and its biological systems is either a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding on your part. Ecocide is again a core tenant of the movement and many of us have been telling this story since Polly Higgins started it in earnest. Clearly radical transformation is required but that does not mean that imminent green house gas tipping points are irrelevant or ill conceived points to exercise in a comprehensive communication strategy.
    Finally whilst I appreciate your framing of how we achieve change not through legitimising existing power struggles and find this useful in considering how best to proceed, at the same time there are powerful interests who are not yet ready to release their extractive structures whilst vast profit remains untapped in the ground. With this, and our understanding that love and connection are central to the changes that are need, I still cannot ignore the words of Frederick Douglass “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

  25. Michael says

    May 9, 2020 at 3:31 pm

    Charles, this essay touched me deeply, as you speak from that important place of the middle: the heart. Like your essays on Coronavirus and Conspiracy Theories you manage to create an authentic heart space without being equivocal. Your message is subtle, beautiful and inspiring: we are being asked to live in the uncertainty of the middle and to love being there. The Separation you speak of is so pervasive and divisive, and we so easily fall on one side or other, your solution of the all-encompassing synthesis of this division informed by love, will resonate with many people who are concerned with the extreme positions that are taken in the climate debate, ( and in fact in all debates).

    I would say to all those on either side of the climate argument, listen to where your motivation comes from: is it from a place of love or a place of fear? The ‘climate denier’ who belittles the actions of young people like Greta Thunberg as ‘misguided’ or ‘manipulated’, the XR climate activist who believes ‘rage’ is ok (it’s in your strapline); both sides are acting in the less-than-full unconditional love zone that will be required for the future healthy development of people and planet. Charles, What you bring as a seed for future action is so inspiring. Thank you!

  26. kamir bouchareb st says

    May 29, 2020 at 2:07 pm

    very good

  27. kamir bouchareb st says

    June 1, 2020 at 9:38 am

    very good thank you

  28. kamir bouchareb st says

    July 3, 2020 at 1:44 pm

    good article thanks

  29. kamir bouchareb st says

    July 12, 2020 at 5:53 pm

    nice

  30. Andrew Macdonald says

    July 24, 2020 at 2:18 pm

    Eisenstein’s ideas are great. What do to with them though is the “question”? Part of me wants to build a Manhattan-style project to make them fissionable, and then we could blow the world up with an atomic bomb of “love”. Of course building the reactors and infrastructure for such a project is an enormous task, but then I remembered that “natural” nuclear reactors, first postulated by University of Arkansas professor Dr. Paul Kuroda in the early 1950s have been discovered (their remnants anyway) and one of them found in the state of Gabon in West Africa, in the Oklo mines, operated for approximately 150 millions years, running like clockwork the whole time with a thirty minute reaction cycle – natural deposits of Uranium would react and create sufficient heat to boil off natural groundwater, which then seeped back into the fissures and “moderated” and cooled the reaction – imagine that? 150 millions years!
    Anyway, natural nuclear reactions aside, dirty” bombs of love are probably the way to go. They are not as sexy as a big fissionable explosion, but in the long run may be safer and work faster. Instead of “explosions” we need to just think “contamination”. Let’s all get out there and contaminate the world with love and respect for our fellow beings and all life. If we think of love as a pathogen that is contagious (like a virus) then maybe we can infect everything and everybody in no time! Of course there will always be people who have built up an immunity to love, like our President, but I believe the vast majority of folks worldwide are susceptible to an infection.

  31. kamir bouchareb st says

    November 20, 2020 at 9:29 am

    very good

  32. Rose Perkins says

    September 1, 2021 at 5:09 pm

    I found the piece inspiring, although I have to confess my heart sank when I saw the admiring reference to Alan Savory. His work has largely been discredited, and perpetuates a harmful and misleading narrative that denies the major role that livestock plays in the destruction of the natural world. I’ve posted a link below to an article that’s a good starting point for a critical appraisal of his work. A word of constructive criticism – please don’t equate science with left-brained reductionism. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but this is the impression I’ve gained from reading some of your articles (and from your endorsement of Alan Savory who is essentially anti-science). Science done well (based on the principles of truth, transparency, accountability, openness to criticism, hypothesis building and testing) is completely compatible with the ‘beautiful world’ you envision. In fact, as a scientist myself, I believe it’s essential for it. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2017-2-march-april/feature/allan-savory-says-more-cows-land-will-reverse-climate-change%3famp.

  33. Rosemary Perkins says

    September 1, 2021 at 5:49 pm

    Some more thoughts regarding the the role and value of the scientific process – it is open to criticism and our scientific knowledge is constantly evolving. The fact that some hypotheses are disproved is not a sign that science doesn’t work, but that it does. Whilst not perfect, science is one of the last bastions of truth that we have and we disregard and denigrade it at our peril. Having just published a critical review of a pharma-funded paper that was misleading regarding the harmful effect of pesticides – that was published by the same peer-reviewed journal that published the original article – I can assure that the system largely works despite it’s imperfections. As a scientist it is enormously frustrating to see non-scientists failing to understand this. Scientific consensus amongst experts who have spent their lives and careers studying a subject is one of the most powerful tools we have for understanding the world. I would never dream of challenging the consensus of the experts who have concluded that smoking causes cancer. Similarly, I would not dream of challenging the consensus of 98% of climate scientists who agree on the principles of anthropogenic climate change. That would be sheer arrogance – I know enough to appreciate how little I know, relative to people who have spent their lives studying it (and as an aside, there’s an interesting paper that found the small number of papers that differ from the scientific consensus contain fundamental flaws). Science is hard. Damn hard. With all due respect, have a little humility, and respect for the people who do it well. Humility, respect and love needed all round.

  34. Rosemary Perkins says

    September 2, 2021 at 2:53 am

    Final caveate (yes I have been overthinking this – but it’s important). My previous comments may be taken to mean that we should never question science or the scientific consensus. Of course we should – as I stated, our knowledge is constantly evolving and openness to legitimate criticism is a fundamental component of the scientific process. But best to have a pretty darn good reason for challenging it – based on a deep knowledge of the field and the existing scientific literature. Not on ‘knowledge’ gleaned from online conspiracy sites. Yes, bias exists in science , but this where collective discourse, peer review and evidence is so valuable – we can challenge each other’s biases and conflicts of interest within the scientific discourse. As usual, balance generally the best approach. Link to our previously mentioned peer- reviewed paper doing just that: https://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-021-00533-8

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Charles Eisenstein

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The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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