Pic: Tim Green on Flickr
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
-The ‘Serenity Prayer’ of Alcoholics Anonymous
The first step of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step programme is to admit that our addiction has put our lives out of our control. I believe this is the first step we must all take towards rehabilitating our society, if that is even possible. Before we can regain control, or our dignity, we have to accept that we have lost them. This is the step everybody seems to be working so hard to avoid.
The reason I started down this path was a nagging suspicion that I was lying for a living. Maybe ‘lying’ is too strong a word. But there is definitely a withholding of the truth.
Throughout my career in NGO and environmental writing I have been indoctrinated. I have been trained to write, if not think, in a prescribed set of terms. For a long time I didn’t notice. I thought I agreed with what I was being told to say. Since the early 2000s this could be best summarised as: “The issues are urgent and critical, but if we act now then we can turn them around.”
Sound familiar?
This framing is great for fundraising, which is largely what it was developed for. I should know. I helped. Along with communications, fundraising is the main department I have worked in throughout my career. If I wrote that many of the problems aren’t retrievable, or that NGOs don’t really have solutions for them, what would be the point of donating to us?
This framing also suits modern media. Complex, nuanced analyses of difficult and complex issues seldom provide the obligatory ‘cut through’ these days. The vast bulk of ‘content’ competes for attention on simplicity, digestibility and the immediate preferences of the audience. It’s like fast food, and at least as toxic.
Mass media relies on selling unsustainable products and services. A true portrayal of reality would reveal that to be suicidal. This is why the truth gets much less support from the people with the money than a blizzard of convenient falsehoods.
The absorption and coercion of the original message of the environmental movement has served the dominant industrial economy admirably. Much of what we think of as the environmental movement today directly or tacitly supports the incumbent economic system. Or it operates as a harmless pressure valve.
Throughout the early 2000s the mainstream environmental movement has not only failed to challenge the destructive economic system, it has actively promoted it. The dominant message has been that we can all continue shopping, so long as it’s oxymoronic "conscious consumerism."
We won’t trouble you. Above all else, we won’t trouble you.
And the expensive annual climate change conferences go on in luxurious locations. We're perpetually headed for targets set conveniently in the future. They’re dutifully reported by the mainstream media, and by people like me in the mainstream NGOs. They’re portrayed as if they are destinations we will reach, or at least are straining to reach. By the time the deadlines expire they're largely forgotten.
Hands up who recalls that the UN’s Agenda 21 originally aimed for global sustainable development by the year 2000? The 21 was supposed to refer to the new sustainable 21st century.
When the latest goals get abandoned, they’re just get replaced with shiny new ones, a bit further off. In 2015 the UN came up with the Sustainable Development Goals. They aim for - wait for it - sustainable development by 2030…
There’s enormous effort and resources, whole organisations, whole careers like mine, expended to keep pushing the goal posts around on roller-skates. While few are even bothering to really shoot at them.
One can’t help thinking of the drinker, pledging daily to give up tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Kicking the can of Special Brew, or barrel of oil, ever further down the road as he and his world degenerates. But like the internal organs of a chronic alcoholic, our planet’s biological systems have deadlines of their own, real ones, with the emphasis on dead. They're entirely independent of the ones we keep inventing.
Complicity in this farce has become the mainstay of the mainstream environmental movement. The solutions are eternally just around the corner, enshrined in the latest set of targets and promises. So there’s no need to really challenge either the audience or the destructive system we inhabit.
The extent of my adherence to this has defined my success in my career on a day to day and long term basis. To this day if I write anything that doesn’t conform to it, I will be ‘punished’ with rejection or re-editing until the material complies.
That’s why this material, what I really think, is not on the websites of any of the major NGOs I have worked for. It is instead being self-published here, on a blog site with a handful of subscribers.
My day job requires getting conforming material produced as fast as possible. I learned that the less I strayed from the beaten path the faster I could work. This meant a bigger salary. It meant promotion. Most importantly, it brought acceptance and applause from my managers and colleagues. This is what has provided me with nearly all the success I have had. It’s what makes me a functional human being in this society. Not just in the eyes of those I work with, but my family, friends and almost everybody I encounter.
Of course, there's always the option of being a ‘maverick’. I could always write whatever I like. But this, as I’m demonstrating with this free to everyone newsletter, is a far riskier and less lucrative approach. It requires anyone attempting it to find their own channels and outlets for their work and seek to get paid for them independently.
I’ve demonstrated this recently in earlier incarnations of this writing. Three years ago I got one of these articles published anonymously on a relatively mainstream New Zealand website. They paid $100 for more than 1,000 words that took me weeks to hone. I have got five times as much for material in the normal vein, written in a fraction of the time.
My honest piece got more than 7,000 shares on Facebook. It prompted a few Reddit streams. The site published another piece from someone else attacking it a couple of days after it went out. That was fine by me, it kept the conversation rolling. Then, for the first time in my writing career, the editor flatly refused to publish anything further. He refused to explain. He wouldn’t offer any editorial guidance or negotiate about how we might keep going. He only hinted at a discomfort with anonymity, and that the piece had “sparked some debate in the office.”
The last time I tried the full-on full-time maverick approach was when I was young enough not to need to make much of a living. Even then, the romance of being almost completely unread while manual labouring to pay my bills wore off rapidly. Then the financial obligations as a husband and father got the better of me.
But, the internet, I hear you cry! Yes, the internet has exponentially increased the channels and outlets available. In doing so, it has also exponentially increased the competition. This includes competition from a lot of people who don’t need to get paid for their writing.
A genuine counterculture is by definition a niche market. The average annual income of non-commercially minded writers is at roughly the point where you consider cooking roadkill. Pursuing that would most likely mean having to seek other employment even less in line with my personal beliefs and preferences.
The comforting rationalisation is that a writer can have more positive influence anyway by conforming. It’s hard to have any influence at all if almost nobody reads what you write. Especially if you can’t actually write much because you have to do it for free while also making a living doing something else.
This creates a pretty stark choice for would-be environmental communicators. Fail in your chosen career before you start, or play by the rules. Living costs, especially home ownership, have people eyeing up their spare kidneys all over the developed world. One way I could have a career and raise my family in relatively stress-free conditions. The other I would very likely drink myself to death, possibly because I sold one of the internal organs that would have kept me alive.
Why this isn’t just about me
The dangerous thing is this.
The environmental movement’s mantra, that the issues are urgent and critical, but if we act now then we can turn them around, is not the whole truth. Setting it in concrete has denied us the ability to see this, or discuss other options in the main forums.
Instead, these discussions go on around the coffee machine. They exacerbate the tinny buzz of our cognitive dissonance.
Many environmentalists now feel unable to say in public what they actually believe. If I’d have wanted to live my whole life like that, I would have become a priest.
My suspicion is that this may be one of the main things holding environmental NGOs back. The faint whiff of lies and hypocrisy is fueling increasing distrust and hostility towards us. There’s an urgent and critical need to think differently. We have to get our thinking back in line with our real beliefs about reality as fast as possible.
Even if this narrative may have been a reasonably accurate summary of the situation back in the early 2000s, it is not so now. What would I choose as a single statement to summarise the state of our world? Something more like: “Our life support systems and civilisation are falling down the stairs towards collapse. Everybody needs to get their shit together.”
I also have some serious concerns about the way the established narrative fits so neatly into our habitual human-centered modes of thinking. We’ve deformed natural processes to the extent that two thirds of the world’s mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have been exterminated in my lifetime. The world is set to have more plastic in the oceans than fish by 2050. Toxins pollute every animal’s body on Earth, including yours, mine and those of our children. The world is experiencing climatic conditions that are out of whack by hundreds of thousands of years. And yet, those who are supposed to be the most ‘ecologically minded’ are still saying: “It’s alright, we got this.” It’s like coming home to find your teenager has left your car a burning carcass in the neighbour’s living room, but still insists he and his mate Spike will make it good as new.
Every NGO I have worked for prides itself on being ‘science based’. The science has stacked up year on year to say that climate change, species extinction and pollution can’t be ‘solved’ or averted through technology or minor changes in our lifestyle. But we keep suggesting that they can. We’re in danger of engaging in nearly as much denial as those who claim the challenges don’t exist.
We are confusing what people want to hear with what they need to hear.
This is not surprising in a culture almost entirely shaped around consumer taste.
Tell people what they want, and you are rewarded. Few people want to hear that this civilization is headed for irrevertible catastrophes, so they don’t buy it, literally. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
This world is not what we thought we ordered. It doesn’t look like the ads.
Today’s western industrialised society has an enormously reduced ability to think beyond the personal and into the communal. As individuals we may personally prefer not to know the full scale of the problems that beset us. It may even be true that we respond better if we deliberately limit our understanding to what we feel we can directly cope with and influence. But that does not mean that the best way forward is for our entire society to operate on the basis of artificially limited, delusional or magical thinking. Or worse still, trying to operate as a bunch of separate groups arguing in terms largely unrelated to reality. It’s like two bald men arguing over a hedgehog they have mistaken for a comb.
The mainstream environmental movement acknowledges that solving our ecological crisis won’t be easy. But to what extent do we have the humility to even consider that key aspects of this are completely out of our control? Could it be that we may be able to take much more meaningful and useful action from that understanding? Is it possible that it is actually this lack of humility that is standing between us and our best responses?
Sustainabile publishes every Monday.
Sounds very much like the book "Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability" Ehrenfeld also speaks to the elephant in the room. He remains optimistic though, understanding that change can happen, it just needs the right catalyst.