Don’t talk me down from the ledge, or I’ll never learn to fly
Some responses to the responses to Sustainabile
After the first phase of Sustainabile, I’ve had time to reflect on the response. I’m capturing this here because I didn’t always respond in comments and social media in full, in a way I would like.
This is not because there were an overwhelming amount of it. It’s more because I’m busy with a day job and mimicking the behaviour of a normal suburban Dad with a family. I was also avoiding spending my days arguing with people on anti-social media. I was especially trying not to hassle people who hadn’t even read the blog or expressed any interest in it.
I called this: “staying in lane”. I reckon it might be good practise for a few more of us.
But I realise that the conversation around the responses could be more important than the articles themselves. Also, I figure if readers start talking about this stuff themselves, which I hope you do, you might get similar responses.
I should say from the outset that Sustainabile has led to some encouraging exchanges with beautiful people. Some have reflected similar feelings with touching solidarity and insight. Many have rightfully responded with the key question: “So, then, how do we live?” which we’ll try and grapple with in the next thread. It’s been a pleasure. But it has to be said that at the moment I could fit that group into a mini-bus to the beach, with plenty of room for the inflatables.
Here’s a run down of some of the other feedback, and what I think it might mean.
The sound of silence
There weren’t that many responses to Sustainabile. During the initial posting period I ended up with a couple of hundred free subscribers. Views on posts ranged from a few hundred to a couple of thousand. There were a total of a couple of dozen comments on each piece. These came through either on the blog itself or related anti-social media posts. It didn’t exactly go viral. It was more like the kind of discreet infection you get from close, intimate contact.
Being ignored was a founding premise of the blog, so was not especially surprising. These ideas have been ignored for decades by people more than able to comprehend them, for all the reasons I write about. This is despite many writers more gifted than me pointing them out for some years. Some of this denial has been subconscious, some quite deliberate.
In today's content blizzard anyone who isn’t famous and doesn’t know anybody famous is largely throwing paper airplanes into a landfill. When I gathered the hubris to train as a professional writer in the 1990s I didn't know the world and his dog would be constantly publishing their thoughts before I retired. Had I known I might have become an adventuring archeologist and antiques dealer.
More people are talking about the subjects I’m grappling with now. This is partly because they are rapidly becoming unavoidable. But most people still prefer to spend their media down-time watching people bake cakes, dance, have sex or pretend to kill each other.
Of course, it could also be that there wasn’t much response because I was barking up the wrong tree, or plain wrong. That was the most interesting thing about the silence. I didn’t expect to have to deal with a giggling line of groupies outside my office. I hadn't drafted my refusal of a Nobel Peace Prize. But I did expect people to argue with me. Nobody did.
I've written that nearly all sustainability professionals are wasting their time and complicit in the systems they pretend to be fighting. I've criticised anybody mildly affluent who lives in an industrialised country, bitcoin and the entire political class. I’ve suggested that most of my readers covertly support the slaughtering of innocents in resource wars to stay rich.
I’ve said that we’re probably no smarter than monkeys and should give up hope. I posted this on social media sites where I have a combined audience of a few thousand people. Others shared it too. One person suggested that the On the Originality of Species story was “Mostly BS.” But when asked to clarify he just told me to read a particular book (see below) and then stopped responding.
That was it in terms of contrary voices.
This could be a cultural thing. I have lived in Aotearoa New Zealand now for more than 15 years. I’ve got used to a little social quirk. If you say something a Kiwi doesn’t agree with, more often than not they won’t argue, or even respond. They’ll just pretend you never said it. That is unless it’s deeply personal or offensive, or suggests that their country is not the best place on Earth.
It’s really a quite nice hangover from British reticence. But it can also make it frustrating trying to talk politics, or about any serious subject. It’s like the entire nation is looking at the (admittedly lovely) scenery, going “yeah, right, whatever”, until you stop talking. You find yourself making more and more trenchant comments to blank looks. Little comes back except an awkward drop in fishing invites. This is especially true of rugby loving, SUV driving Kiwi males when ranted at by an apocalyptically minded autistic ex-crustie POM.
So I could write it off. But thanks to my career my LinkedIn profile connects to sustainability professionals all over the world. Many of them are still deeply engaged in the practices I have dismissed and lampooned in these pages. Some of them sent me messages of support. Not one of them raised a counter argument. None suggested that everything was fine, or even headed in the right direction.
The frightening conclusion I can draw is that most of what I have written is largely true. And we all know it. But most of the key people are still going to avoid discussing it, let alone changing course.
Join in with [insert new concept/movement/group here]
I appreciate the non-defeatist sentiment. However, this response overlooks one of the central points of Sustainabile. I imagine this is because it's one of the most confronting.
No new movement or group is going to ‘save’ us from what’s coming.
Sustainabile comes from me spending 30 odd years joining an endless parade of movements and groups gathered around the latest buzzwords, or rehashed old ones. Traditional woodworking. Neo-pagansim. Reclaim the Streets. Non-violent direct action. Veganism. The Left. Anti-war. Eco-logical footprinting. Conservation. Permaculture. Rewilding. Cradle to Cradle. The circular economy. Doughnut Economics. Transition Towns. Conscious consumerism. Minimalism. Non-dualism. I’ve grabbed at all these and more, like a chimp swinging from circus rings.
Sustainabile came about because I was sick of it. Sick of being on the latest bandwagon, stuck in its own conceptual mud on the path to nowhere.
There are a limited number of ideas I want to pursue. I’ll try to do that in future blogs. But forgive me if I don’t leap at your latest offer. I don't need another chance to work for free for years. I'm not yearning for another opportunity to go through the motions of ‘changing/saving the world’ like a Cargo Cult for the white middle classes.
I’m not saying we haven’t yet found the right eco-concept, or cluster of them, to change our course. It’s that I think there’s no “solution” like that coming.
You have to read/watch/listen to this!
I’ve been ingesting media on environmentalism all my life. I blame my Mum's affection for David Attenborough. I had a reading age of 16 when I was nine. I’m autistic. I was brought up in an effectively single parent family with two older brothers who bullied me. Reading was loads easier than dealing with people. The books I read allowed me to ‘info bomb’ people when I did have to talk at them, or regurgitate quotes rather than attempt normal conversation. Sustainabile is an extension of that same impulse. So is my 20 odd year career as a professional environmentalist, researcher and writer.
I still love it when people recommend books and authors, and will probably take up many of them. But I don’t think the way I do because I haven’t read the right book yet. It's also not because I haven't viewed the right YouTube link or TED talk, or subscribed to the right podcast.
Some of these ‘recommendations’ are just solution delusions in drag. Particularly when they centre around the latest conceptual fads. They stink of the continuing effort to avoid the inevitable; desperate attempts to enjoy our affluent intellectualised, industrialised lifestyles a while longer. They suggest a need to feel a touch less guilty and more self righteous. (I’m saying all this, you understand, because it takes one to know one.)
Concerns for my mental health
One of the great joys of Sustainabile has been connecting with new people. Given the material, this has often been on the level of grief and desperation, which I think is a healthy and realistic response to our situation.
So Sustainabile cannot be written off on the assumption that I wrote it while depressed or having a mental health crisis. I think this is a real risk among the positivity people.
Instead, I’d recommend playing the ball, not the player. Check first whether what I said was accurate, no matter what mood I was in.
On the other hand, in many ways the ideas in Sustainabile really are, deliberately, the forerunners of a genuine mental breakdown. Because I have a suspicion that only a breakdown in our mental models has any chance of preventing a breakdown in our entire society. What I’m suggesting, really, is a global mid-life chrysalis, where we break down what we think we know entirely, so that something wholly new can emerge.
I’ll add more responses to responses here when/if I receive them.
Don’t talk me down from the ledge, or I’ll never learn to fly
Eventually, after about 15 years of rabid activism, I lost interest in new solutions. Your list nails it entirely,
"Traditional woodworking. Neo-pagansim. Reclaim the Streets. Non-violent direct action. Veganism. The Left. Anti-war. Eco-logical footprinting. Conservation. Permaculture. Rewilding. Cradle to Cradle. The circular economy. Doughnut Economics. Transition Towns. Conscious consumerism. Minimalism. Non-dualism."
The situation we're now in is not due to a lack of solutions. It may even be due to too many of them obscuring the fact that we already know what we have to do, and we already know how to do it. We just don't like what this knowledge means.
A valuable read, again. Thank you. Interesting comments about kiwi apathy and avoidance tactics. I share the same experiences, I am also a Brit who has been here 16 years. People do not seem to like feeling judged, blamed or associated with undesirable behaviour choices. My own attempts to write about the hard stuff have met with crickets.