The Humbling

We went up against an entire planet. The one we live on. Teenagers enjoying the comforts of home while saying we hate the homemaker and refusing to wash up. How was that going to end?

Think of Earth as the ‘Life Star’ in a reimagined Star Wars. Except the only war is us versus our own life support systems. So it’s kind of Star Self Harm. Or do we feel we are prisoners here? We must escape paradise to take our chances in the dead voids of space? Do the billionaire ‘genius’ spacemen not know where we are? Or has the bastard son of Scientology taken over Silly-con Valley?

In 1972 we managed to blast our monkey bodies far enough into space to see the Earth as a blue ball. It’s popular to believe this caused a revolution in ecological consciousness. Half a century later, I’m not so sure. I wonder if our industrialised brains were so messed up by then that it distorted our perspective. We decided instead that the world was too small for us and our ambitions. 

Maybe we need to spend a whole lot more time with our noses in the dirt. Maybe that’s what we need to re-establish a healthy sense of scale. 

We laugh at Flat Earthers. Then we go on thinking and acting as if the Earth is an inanimate marble we just happen to be on by accident. Dead Earthers.

Again in 1972, James Lovelock did his best. He created the Gaia Hypothesis. It suggested that, wow, maybe the Earth was a living being after all. Something as obvious as the nose on your face to normal homo sapiens for 200,000 years. To this day a lot of commentators use phrases like “acts as if” for this. As if the planet is pretending it’s a living being, rather than actually being one. 

It took science that long to fathom something so fundamental. Which raises important questions. Like: “Hey, maybe we’ve just been elaborating how fucking stupid we are since about 1637.”  

It’s like the colonialists of that same era, desperately slaughtering the locals while apparently also “discovering” these amazingly empty countries devoid of all human life.  

Around about now writers usually say something like “Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of what science has brought us.” And I do too. But I’m an idiot. Mostly what science has brought me is other people’s things. The lunatics have been running the asylum I have lived in all my life. They are the ones who ran my education.  

It’s a complex, living world. We insist on treating it like a machine. Like pulling apart kittens to look for the batteries. Like the US military’s animal cyborg programmes. They’re wiring up dolphins to radio controllers to prove they’re clever enough to create brain damaged dolphins.

Everyone’s suddenly panicking about artificial intelligence, overlooking that fact that most of what we currently refer to as intelligence is artificial in the first place.

Who is actually brain damaged in that scenario? 

And most of us still don’t get it. 

Yesterday I saw a groundbreaking new 'sustainable' building block. It’s partly made of mycelium. Science has only recently “discovered” another thing that normal people have understood forever. The forest is alive. Plants and trees communicate and collaborate. They do a lot of it through mycelium. These fungal tendrils make up vast nervous systems of intricate, complex and subtle nutrient exchange. Cut to the video for the new building block. Someone is pointing a blow torch at it to prove it doesn't burn easily. 

Now you can build your ugly little hamster boxes to put televisions in, out of the exterminated nervous system of the forest. Yay for progress. 

Do we look like the good guys in this space opera? I don’t think so. We’re stormtroopers. We’re standing knee deep in smouldering corpses in appropriately white suits. We’re passing our last moments chatting about how to make the Empire’s value chains more sustainable. Should we ban plastic straws from the Star Destroyer canteens?

Every story we’ve ever been told is crystal on this. Want to be the good guys? Live in the wild. Wear simple clothing. Believe in magical forces. Want to be the bad guys? Surround yourself with weapons, flashing lights and buttons. Oh, and kill loads of innocent people, preferably children. 

True, none of us woke one morning and said, “Hey, let’s kill the planet!” It’s more like someone told us for 30 years that we were forcing our Mum to chain smoke Rothmans. We just didn’t really care enough to stop pushing them in her lips. Now the whole place stinks of smoke. We’re all desperately unhealthy. The corporate pushers are rich. And we’re going to inherit the earth only to scratch out shallow graves for our children.

So let’s search blindly through our collapsing home for a way out. My guess is as good as yours as to where. Like I said, I’m an idiot. I have my own prejudices and distractions to deal with.

We all talk about ecological and indigenous ‘lenses’. We don’t realise that we’re the ones with the artificial lenses. Only we need them because our natural perception of the world is so distorted and short sighted. Indigenous people are the ones with the clearer view of actual reality. We’re in the opticians wearing 14 layers of blurred glass. We’re squinting at the backlit mirror that says “Y O U R E D E A D” in foot high letters. We’re guessing that the middle letter might be a p, or does it say sex, or money? The professionals flick between the lenses asking “better, or worse?” Then they sell us something wildly expensive from Nike, Adidas or with the Nazi styling of Hugo Boss. 

I don’t know about you, but my eyes are sore from all the crap that’s been poured into them through this process. So whatever I choose now may not be right for you, nor even for me. The best we can hope for is that there’s some sort of collision between our foibles and what the universe has to offer. Is that fate, or chance? I don’t know. I’m not sure I can see the difference anymore. 

We either become humble, or we will be humbled. Those are our options. 

At the moment a lot of us are attempting the opposite. We’re rising to the “challenges” with inappropriate bravado. 

Or we’ve sidestepped into ‘life coaching’. Yes, we do life better than you. All of it. Life. So much better we can coach you at it. You. With decades of traumatic loss of loved ones. Your gut, unsightly hairs and mysterious odours. Your undiagnosed spectrum or personality disorders. Your drinking. The children you’re frightened of. The partner who would need a space suit to become more sealed off and distant. The future you can’t see a point in. 

We can coach you on all that. Because we’re quite good at Pilates.   

If we’re not careful we pin our hopes on such impossibilities. Or we join the charade. 

We want all the massively overpopulated people to be happy and healthy. 

We want technological advances and the wild lands that technology destroys. 

We want our cake and to eat the indigenous peoples’ cake too. Don’t even let them eat cake. Steal all the cake off them. Squirrel it away in your tax free, offshore, cake haven. Then lock it all up and call it austerity. Take the cakes off anyone with less bullets than we’ve got. But we don’t want to pull the trigger ourselves, so we’re building robots to do it for us. 

Meanwhile, professional sustainability experts work with the scraps. We try to create environmentalists without them looking like hippies. Like training athletes without letting them wear shorts. 

We try to make things "more sustainable”. It’s like the frog in the old trick maths question. The frog leaps half the remaining distance across the lake each leap. How many leaps to the other side?

And we sell out cheap to the seemingly endless capitalist temptations. What we should be doing is smashing up the shops, like the overlooked teenagers are doing.  

Which, oddly, reminds me of something. 

Some years ago. I’m standing on the pavement in an Indian market. We'd gone there with WWF to see both the tigers the rangers hadn't yet sold to the poachers. My partner Fiona is trying to convince someone she doesn’t want a leather whip. Behind her I notice a calf accelerating down the pavement towards us. Its legs are flailing like a half eaten giant spider. 

Cows, as you probably know, are sacred in India. So nobody shunts it off the pavement. 

I have seconds.

Fiona has her back to it. She’s trying to convince someone she doesn’t need a matching spice bowl set or a massive balloon. 

It’s unreal. Unbelievable. There can’t really be a cow charging towards us, can there? My brain scrambles. If I try to tell Fiona things might not go well. She’ll have to process what I’m saying, believe it, and act very fast. In the confusion she might move the wrong way, directly into the path of the marauding bovine. The seconds pass.

I blurt “Cow!” at the very last moment. I try to drag Fiona away. She instinctively resists, reducing the dodge. The cow clatters into us. The three of us pile into the dust. 

She blames me for not warning her faster. I get no thanks for spotting the risk and doing something to save our skins. 

You know what’s next. For some decades there’s been a cow called climate change clattering down our pavement. This is a particularly true in New Zealand, the incredibly polluting bucolic cow factory. The cows are destroying our markets. They’re ruining our food and hurting people. Most of us are still standing in the way. We're wondering whether this is natural. Is it something we have set in motion? Can we make money out of it? Maybe we can grab some produce while everyone is distracted. Or carve off a piece of the cow. Some curl up in a ball, hoping it will magically disappear. 

I’ve been working on how to scream ‘cow!’ politely for decades. Everyone says I shouldn’t say it too loud or it will just cause panic. I’m still standing on the pavement. I expect no thanks when it crashes into us. 

I just wish I could have thought faster, sooner. 

Because pretty soon all we’ll be left with is a load of bullshit, pain and everybody blaming each other.