Tilting at wind turbines
Most of what we now call sustainability aims to avoid addressing our predicament.
We all know the real way to change course. We need to radically reduce our extraction and consumption of the world’s resources. But we don’t want to do that.
Here’s why. Let’s use global ecological footprinting as a very rough guide. This is where we estimate the world’s ‘natural resources’. We map that against our consumption of them, divided up among the population. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we live a lifestyle that, to be sustained for all, would need more than four Earths.
Kiwis responsibly addressing the world’s multiple crisis should therefore be reducing their consumption by about 75%. That’s three quarters less of everything. Uncannily, the scale of this decrease roughly mirrors the scale of global emissions reductions required by the IPCC.
Crucially, this is ACROSS THE BOARD. Across everything we do. Not just cutting out meat once a week, buying a slightly more efficient car of buying some offsets that plant some trees. It means 75% less food from overseas. 75% less gadgets. 75% less new clothes. Look around your home. Delete three quarters of it. That’s what actual action looks like.
Real sustainability is binary. We’re either operating at a level where the system will not degrade significantly in the foreseeable future, or we aren’t. Every day we aren’t is a day we’re damaging the planet and every interconnected relationship we have with it. We’re destroying all other forms of life on it, including other people.
It’s not, contrary to a million PowerPoints, a journey. That’s like a criminal being on a journey towards going straight. They might steal slightly less stuff than last year. They’re still a criminal. We’re still unsustainable.
So that’s the key way we could attempt to ‘solve’ this predicament. Be about 75% poorer than you are now. That’s not something I’m planning on. You?
So we more or less carry on until things fall apart. We might lose that 75% anyway, or a lot more. We might get lucky and cling on to more of it until we die. We try to stay as rich as we are at the expense of others. We go on ratcheting up the risk that we’ll lose it all for us and our descendants. Unavoidable scenarios will include more financial collapses. More World Wars. Societal collapse. Possibly the complete extinction of the human race. I’m not exaggerating.
In terms of multi-generational material wealth, we’re locked into a lose, lose situation. The only choice we have is how we choose to lose, and when.
Our choices are simple and stark.
Imagine you’re rich person in a story. You get a visitation from a magical being. They say you’re going to get much poorer soon. But you have time to prepare. What should you do?
A sensible person would go look at the sort of life you’re going to live. Go see the poor. That might include people living overseas without the startling wealth you enjoy. Or go back in history. Consider how people lived before we had access to incredible amounts of fossil fuel energy.
What can we do now with our wealth to prepare us for the rapidly approaching time when we won’t be wealthy any more?
This is the enormous, privileged opportunity most of us are squandering, or completely ignoring.
Field environmentalists like me have a head start. Part of our job has been turning people in these situations into fundraising material. Now it’s time to paint ourselves properly into the picture.
It’s time to acquire the things we’ll need.
Tools. Robust homes without debt that don’t require too much input. Space to grow food. Functioning community networks. Some kind of shared spiritual grounding. A sharable, collaborative approach to reality. Basically, a life outside the ridiculous fictions of our society.
Or fuck it, don’t bother. Eat Cheese Puffs. Watch Netflix. Stay drunk. Believe your kids will be safe because your house price goes up. Wish on the magic numbers in your bank account.
Most of us obfuscate. One of those obfuscation is environmentalism. We think it expresses our desire to solve the problems. But it exists because we don’t want to do the things that might work. So we pretend we want to solve some different problems. Like the one that goes: “How do I tackle the polycrisis and stay rich.”
That rules out the only possible answer, so the charades begin.
Theories and models. Cradle to Cradle. The circular economy. The Donut Economy. Complexity Theory. The Sustainable Development Goals. All the fancy eco-concepts and missed targets that make my living.
The spiritual bypasses. The pseudo-neo-indigeneity. The coffee-shop animism. The garage sale at the Zen centre. All the stuff that makes up my hobbies.
The bargaining stage of grief. Killing time while we scoff all the goodies and try to set our kids up to do the same.
Environmentalists like me accuse various industries of trying to ‘fend off’ environmental regulations. We scorn their elaborate, self-referential schemes. We point out how little real impact they have on the problems. Meanwhile, we create ever more elaborate self-referential schemes that make little or no impact on the problems. Then we celebrate when their schemes start to look like ours.
This is why the “you drove to the oil protest” argument is so powerful. Protestors taking a moral stance have one option. Reduce your material wealth and impact as fast as possible, as well as the systems you inhabit. Build communities that are doing this at scale and pace. If we’re not doing that then we’re just playing Don Quixote, tilting at wind turbines.
Thanks for telling it like it is.
Trapped in Vain Decline