CLIMATE CHANGE
The Age of Disconnection
Can Humanity start walking back to the start?
As the climate catastrophe slowly approaches, humanity finds itself in an existential moment of reckoning: like a criminal, head in hands, it is forced to face itself and its situation, whether it likes it or not. This is the time when many feelings surface: guilt and regret for what we’ve done to our own home, for the species already lost, and those we are watching helplessly go extinct. Fear, anxiety and confusion about what may lie ahead. Anger, which some of us falsely prefer to direct solely towards those most recently in power, who blocked any meaningful action just so they can temporarily save themselves. And superimposed across all of this, a big sadness and grief. Some of us toggle daily between reality and hope, pessimism and optimism, trying to find the magic combination between denial and acceptance that will help us figure out what to tell our children. Some are being complacent, while some hard realists have already surrendered to the notion that humans are overrated, and another species deserves to take over from us. Others yet are still in disbelief that the world that sustained us for so long could possibly be heading into trouble.
It is an overwhelming cocktail of feelings, and different people respond in different ways to it. My main feeling has been frustration: frustration that although we already know so much about climate change and ecology, we are not doing anything about it. My frustration led me to ask the big question: what are the cognitive failures in humans that prevent behaviour change, and what can we do about addressing them. As I struggled with this question, I found myself falling deeper and deeper into sadness, as I realised how our very survival through the ages has depended on a number of vices: greed, competition, self-preservation. Our entire civilisation has been based on approaches and skills which, as we now discover, don’t really have any use anymore, at least on this planet. We are bound to go extinct simply because we are using “old tools”. Capitalism is just one of these tools that is quickly becoming obsolete.
As a biologist, I often can’t help but think that we were never “made” to face such a crisis, and I explain my point later. You could argue that our brains are already too far down the path of evolution to understand how we had set up our whole lives, societies and economies the wrong way. This moment in time is the greatest test ever to our species’ intellectual capacity to self-reflect. It will challenge us more than the discovery of DNA, more than the trip to the Moon. Because it requires that we change our very way of thinking, about everything around us.
Yet moments of loss and grief can be powerfully transformative. They can open up our consciousness beyond the microcosm of our day-to-day preoccupations and enable us to see ourselves from the outside, from above. From the Past, and even from the Future. When one does that, it becomes evident that we have created a number of separations in our world:
Separate from Nature
Humans consider themselves separate from Nature, although they are one of the many species within an interconnected ecosystem. Our separation is evident in how we talk about “the environment”, as if the environment is “out there” and we are over here. As if the environment is not where we live, breathe, what we depend on for our survival. The more we consider ourselves a foreign object on Earth, the more the prophecy of destruction becomes more likely. Earth is a Being with its own wisdom. It has sensed that we consider it a foreign object, and it is beginning to defend itself: it has itself started to treat us like an invader, cranking up the temperature to get rid of us. The more we consider ourselves separate from Earth, the more we exploit and destroy it. But we are of course amputating ourselves.
Separate from other Humans
We have extended our separation from Nature into our very societies. The same greed and exploitation we practice towards Nature has moved into our relationships: we are increasingly becoming individualistic and selfish, motivated by money, “goals”, competition, which are in themselves not meaningful achievements that can make us happy. They are toxic mind traps on the way to unhappiness. Technology has converted human relationships into brief momentary digital transactional interactions. Our workplaces are also a prime example. Corporations are exploiting staff in work environments rife with mental health issues that are driving droves of employees to suicide hotlines. Burnout is now an acute epidemic, destroying people’s lives.
Separate from our children
Our preoccupation with ourselves and the “right now” has also estranged us from our children and our long term future. If we really cared about them we would care about where the world will be 30 years from now. Our children are set to inherit a world with far fewer resources, an Earth that can grow far fewer crops, a climate that at times will be deadly, and a society in turmoil and possibly international conflict as humans fight for food, water and other resources. All this because we failed to reconnect.
Separate from ourselves
We have separated ourselves from the things that used to bring us joy. Most of our jobs do not develop our interests and our passions, which are usually either about making things, servicing other people, or achieving some sort of tangible change. Most jobs today do not actually produce anything. This only alienates us from our true selves and we adopt a “jaded” view of life where we accept that we will never feel fulfilled or purposeful. We accept that our only way to survive is to take one of these jobs so that we can exploit the system that is exploiting us.
Reconnecting
Reconnecting requires radical thinking. It requires going back to where we started. Retracing our steps in order to see that separateness is not a solution. Realising that capitalism is an agressive approach that doesn’t work. Exploitation of nature and people doesn’t work. If Nature loses, we lose. If other countries lose, we lose. If women lose, men lose too. If people of colour lose, white people lose. Building bridges requires acknowledging we are part of a web that connects all the species, all living and inanimate things on the planet. It connects Past, Present and Future.
You can follow me on Twitter @99blackbaloons
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