This is quite a woman!! & this is quite an essay……
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Wake Up! Our World Is Dying and We’re All in Denial
“George Orwell argued that pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible. I found that whether or not we believe we can change the world, even in a small way, acting as if we can is the healthiest emotional stance to take in the face of injustice and destruction.
“He who fights the future has a dangerous enemy,” said Soren Kierkegaard. Life is stressful. We think something is wrong with us, but the problems are endemic and systemic. As a people, we’ve lost our grounding in deep time and in our place. At root, our problems are relationship problems. We have a disordered relationship with the web of life.”
Wake
Up! Our World Is Dying and We’re All in Denial
October 20, 2012 | By Mary Pipher
We live in a culture of denial, especially about the grim reality of
climate change. Sure, we want to savor the occasional shrimp cocktail without
having to brood about ruined mangroves, but we can’t solve a problem we can’t
face.
I don’t like to think about global environmental problems, and neither do
you. Yet we can’t deal with problems we can’t face. Isak Dinesen wrote,
“All sorrows can be borne if put into a story.” Here’s my story. In
the cataclysmic summer of 2010, I experienced what environmentalists call the
“‘Oh shit!’ moment.” At that time, the earth was experiencing its
warmest decade, its warmest year, and the warmest April, May, and June on
record. In 2010, Pakistan hit its record high (129 degrees), as did Russia (111
degrees). For the first time in memory, lightning ignited fires in the peat
bogs of Russia, and these fires spread to the wheat fields further south. As
doctors from Moscow rode to the rescue of heat and smoke victims, they fainted
in their non-air-conditioned ambulances. In July, the heat index in my town,
Lincoln, Nebraska, reached 115 degrees for several days in a row. Our planet
and all living beings seemed to be gasping for breath.
That same month, I read Bill McKibben’s Eaarth,
in which he argues that our familiar Earth has vanished and that we now live on
a new planet, Eaarth, with a rapidly changing ecology. He writes that without
immediate action, our accustomed ways of life will disappear, not in our
grandchildren’s adulthoods, but in the lifetimes of middle-aged people alive
today. We don’t have 50 years to save our environment; we have the next decade.
Nothing I’d previously read about the environment could quite prepare me for
the bleakness of Eaarth.
I couldn’t stop reading, and, when I finished it, I felt shell-shocked. For a
few days, all I could experience was despair. Everything felt so hopeless and
so finite.
During this time, my grandchildren came to visit. As we picked raspberries,
I thought about all the care we lavished on the children in our family. We made
sure they ate healthy foods and brushed their teeth with safe toothpastes. We
examined and treated every little bug bite or scratch. And yet, we–and I mean
all the grandparents in the world, including myself–hadn’t worked to secure
them a future with clean air and water and diverse, healthy ecosystems.
Had we been in a trance? That summer, when I listened to friends talking
about mundane details of life, I wanted to shout at them, “Wake up! Please
wake up! Our old future is gone. Matters are urgent. We have to do something now.”
After years of being a therapist and a mother, I’ve learned that shouting
“wake up” doesn’t work. One of my most dispiriting realizations was
that while I wanted desperately to preserve the world I loved, I didn’t even
know how to share this fact with my closest friends.
One night, my daughter and her family came for dinner during a
record-breaking rainfall. After the baby went to sleep, we watched the wind
whip through the pines and listened to the torrents of rain hammer our windows.
Sara asked if my husband and I thought the rain was related to global climate
change. Jim and I stared at each other, too confused to speak.
My wonderful daughter had the dreams all mothers have for their children.
She was already doing her best. I couldn’t bear to inflict any pain on her.
However, Sara was persistent in her curiosity. In the most positive, calm way
that I could, I told her what I’d recently learned.
Sara was devastated. She and John quickly bundled up the baby and said good
night. I could see her weeping as she tucked Coltrane into his car seat. I felt
anguished, and I wasn’t sure I’d done the right thing. Yet Sara was 33 years
old. Could I really shield her from what scientific experts were telling us?
Would I want to be “protected” from the truth? Wasn’t it better if we
faced these things together?
That next week, I couldn’t enjoy anything. My conversations with my husband
quickly fell into what we call “the dumper.” I was afraid to be
around friends for fear I’d infect them with my gloominess.
I knew I had to find a way out of my state of mind. I couldn’t survive with
all that awareness every minute of my day. I wanted to be happy again, to be
able to laugh, and to snuggle with my grandchildren without worrying about
their futures. But I couldn’t forget what I now understood.
What pulled me out of my despair was the desire to get to work. I didn’t
know what I was going to do. I felt unqualified for virtually everything
involving the environment, but I knew I had to do something to help. It was
unclear how much my action would benefit the world, but I knew it would help
me. I’ve never been able to tolerate stewing in my own anxiety. Action has
always been my healing tonic.
I invited a group of people to my house to discuss what we could do to stop
TransCanada from shipping tar-sand sludge through our state via the Keystone XL
pipeline. We called ourselves The Coalition. For more than a year now, we’ve
met for potluck dinners and planning sessions. We’ve made sure the meetings
have been parties. We’ve had wine, good food, and lots of laughter and hugs.
We’ve tried to end our meetings on a positive note, so everyone would want to
return. None of us has time for extra tedium or suffering, but we like working
together for a common cause.
If you want to discover how the world works, try to change it–especially if
the changes involve confronting the fossil-fuel industry. Our campaign has been
a complicated story about money, power, international corporations, and
politics. But it’s also a simple story, about my friends and me, working to
save our state from what we nicknamed the Xtra Leaky Pipeline.
Through the year, we held rallies, educational forums, and music benefits,
and set up booths at farmers’ markets and county fairs. In other words, we
“massified”–a term we used to signify momentum and getting
increasing numbers of people on board.
By the summer of 2011, our entire state had united around the idea of
stopping the XL Pipeline’s route through our Sandhills and over the Ogallala
Aquifer. Our campaign was the best thing to happen to our state since Big Red
football. Progressives and Western ranchers worked together, and Sierra Club
attorneys were given standing ovations in VFW halls in little towns with no
registered Democrats. We staged tractor brigades and poetry readings against
the pipeline. What all of us had in common was a desire to protect the place we
loved.
As Randy Thompson, a conservative farmer who fought the pipeline, said,
“This isn’t a political issue. There’s no red water or blue water; there’s
clean water or dirty water.”
I wanted to keep Nebraska healthy for my grandchildren. When my grandson
Aidan was 6, he had a growth spurt in his point of view. Our family had gone to
a lake to watch the Perseid meteor showers. Afterward, driving back home, we
crested a hill and Aidan saw the lights of his small town on the horizon. He
said, “Look at my beautiful city.” I responded, “It’s a pretty
town at night with all the twinkling lights.” Aidan was quiet for a moment
and then said, “Nonna, my town is big to me, but small to the rest of the
world.” I sighed. That’s a lesson we all have to learn sooner or later.
In a speech at a rally, I recalled that night. I told the crowd, “Aidan
may be small to TransCanada. He may be small to our governor and legislators,
but he’s big to me, and I’m going to take care of him.”
In January 2012, President Obama denied a permit to TransCanada because of
concerns about Nebraska. But the outcome is uncertain, and we may yet lose our
fight. We’re still working. John Hansen, head of the Nebraska Farmer’s Union,
said, “Working for a cause isn’t like planting corn. You don’t throw in
some seeds and walk away. It’s like milking cows, something you do over and
over, and can never ignore.”
Our coalition isn’t about odds. When we started, we didn’t think we had a
chance. We did it because it was the right thing to do, and we couldn’t let our
state be destroyed without a protest. Our reward for this work has been a sense
of empowerment and membership in what Martin Luther King, Jr., called a beloved
community.
From this work, I’ve learned that saving the world and savoring it aren’t
polarities, but turn out to be deeply related. As Thich Nhat Hanh writes,
“The best way to save the environment is to save the environmentalist.”
George Orwell argued that pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very
idea of improving the world impossible. I found that whether or not we believe
we can change the world, even in a small way, acting as if we can is the
healthiest emotional stance to take in the face of injustice and destruction.
——
“He who fights the future has a dangerous enemy,” said Søren
Kierkegaard. Life is stressful. We think something is wrong with us, but the
problems are endemic and systemic. As a people, we’ve lost our grounding in
deep time and in our place. At root, our problems are relationship problems. We
have a disordered relationship with the web of life.
Right now, the more we connect the dots between events, the more frightened
we become. This reminds me of a night I slept in a tent with three of my
grandchildren. Kate was 6, Aidan was 4, and Claire was 2. Claire and Aidan were
blissfully happy. They snuggled and listened to the sounds of the cicadas and
night birds. Meanwhile, Kate kept telling me she was scared and that she wanted
to sleep in the house. Stupidly, I chided her for her fears. I asked,
“Kate, you are the big sister and the oldest. Why can’t you be as brave as
your sister and brother?” She wailed, “Nonna, they’re little. They
don’t know enough to be scared!”
These days, I often feel like Kate did that night. I know too much about
deforestation, nuclear power plants, our tainted food supply, and our
collapsing fisheries. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know all these things. But if
we adults don’t face and come to grips with our current reality, who will?
Neither individuals nor cultures can keep up with the pace of change.
Recently I was telling my grandchildren about all the things that didn’t exist
when I was a girl. I mentioned televisions (in my rural area), cell phones, the
Internet, cruise control, texting, computerized toys, laptops, video recorders,
headphones for music, and microwaves. The list was so long that my grandson
Aidan asked me, “Nonna, did they have apples when you were a girl?”
We’re bombarded by too much information, too many choices, and too much
complexity. Our problem-solving abilities and our communication and coping
skills haven’t evolved quickly enough to sustain us. We find ourselves rushed,
stressed, fatigued, and upset.
On all levels–international, national, and personal–many situations now
seem too complicated to be workable. A friend of mine put it this way:
“There are no simple problems anymore.”
In addition to the problems that we can describe and label, we have new
problems that we can barely name. Writers are coining words to try to describe
a new set of emotions. For example, Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia to describe “homesickness or
melancholia when your environment is changing all around you in ways that you
feel are profoundly negative.”
We experience our own pain, but also the pain of the earth and of people and
animals suffering all over the world. Environmentalist Joanna Macy calls this
pain “planetary anguish.” We want to help, but we all feel that we
have enough on our plates without taking on the melting polar ice caps or the
dying oceans.
One night before dinner, Jim asked me to sit and have glass of wine with
him. That day, he’d overseen the installation of a heating and air-conditioning
system after a tree had crushed our old one. That same week, our refrigerator
had needed replacing. And suddenly our dishwasher wasn’t working properly
either. I’d been writing about global climate change and working with the
Coalition to Stop the XL Pipeline. I said, “I’ll sit down with you as long
as we don’t have to discuss the fate of the earth.” Jim agreed readily and
added, “I don’t even want to discuss the fate of our appliances.”
The climate crisis is so enormous in its implications that it’s difficult
for us to grasp its reality. Its scope exceeds our human and cultural
resilience systems. Thinking about global climate collapse is like trying to
count two billion pinto beans. Oftentimes, because we don’t know how to
respond, we don’t respond. We develop “learned helplessness” and our
sense that we’re powerless becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In States of Denial, Stanley Cohen writes about Germany and
the denial of the Holocaust. He talked about a state of knowing and not knowing
that arises in ongoing traumatic situations. This “willful ignorance”
occurs when information can’t be totally denied, but can’t be processed either.
That’s the state I think we’re in now when we try to deal with global climate
change.
We live in a culture of denial. A Pew Research Center poll in September 2011
revealed that, in spite of increasing evidence, belief in climate change was at
its lowest level since 1997. In fact, belief had decreased from 71 percent to
57 percent in the previous 18 months. Even the manner in which we discuss
climate change is odd. We don’t talk about “believing in” the laws of
aerodynamics, the DNA code, or faraway galaxies. By now the evidence for global
climate change is solid and the scientific community is united. So why do we
speak of believing in it as if we were speaking of belief in extraterrestrials?
Partly these poll numbers reflect a well-funded and orchestrated
misinformation campaign by the fossil-fuel industry. Robert Proctor at Stanford
University coined another new word, agnotology, for the study of ignorance or doubt
that’s deliberately manufactured or politically generated.
The poll results also can be explained by what Renee Lertzman called
“The Myth of Apathy.” She interviewed people about global climate
change and found that they actually care intensely about the environment, but
that their emotions are so tangled up and they’re so beset by internal
conflicts that they can’t act adaptively. They aren’t apathetic, but rather
shut down psychologically.
All cultures have rules about what can and can’t be acknowledged. This
reminds me of an old joke about the Soviet Union. Two KGB men were walking
together down the street. One of them said to the other, “What do you
think of this system?” “I don’t know,” said the other one.
“I probably think about the same as you do.” “In that
case,” said the first, “I’m going to have to arrest you.”
Social and environmental studies professor Kari Norgaard writes, “The
denial of global warming is socially constructed. In America it is almost as if
relevant information about our climate crisis is classified. Our national
policy towards the devastation we face is, ‘Don’t ask. Don’t tell.'”
We all have a healthy and understandable desire to avoid feeling pain. We
want to savor the occasional shrimp cocktail without thinking about the ruined
mangroves or read a book about lions to children without wondering how many are
left in the wild. Yet we cannot solve a problem we will not face.
Once we face the hard truths about our environmental collapse, we can begin
a process of transformation that I call the “alchemy of healing.”
Despair is often a crucible for growth. As we expand ourselves to deal with our
new normal, we can feel more vibrant and engaged with the world as it is.
We can be intentional when we’re shopping, planning a trip, or working in
our communities. We can be citizens of the world, rather than consumers, and we
can vote every time we hand over our debit card.
We’re all community educators whether we know it or not. Everything we say
and do is potentially a teachable moment for someone. So appoint yourself a
change agent, engage in participatory democracy, and help yourself, your
country, and your world. Belief often follows action. The harder we work, the
likelier we are to experience hope and to improve our situation.
Amazement is another antidote to despair. Author Hannah Tennant-Moore wrote,
“It took me a long time to learn that being miserable does not alleviate
the world’s misery.”
After a rough week, I felt compelled to drive to Spring Creek Prairie, about
30 minutes from my home. I joined a group of birders doing a winter bird count.
It was a grand experience, with long lines of snow geese overhead, woodpeckers
in the burr oaks, and a mink ice-skating in the little pond. However, at some point,
I wanted to be away from people, even the birders I normally enjoy.
I walked alone to a sunny patch of prairie, lay on the ground, and looked at
the sky through the waving big bluestem. I imbibed the prairie. I felt the warm
earth beneath me. I smelled the moisture, the dirt, and the cereal-like aroma
of the tall grasses. I looked up through the golden seed heads at the blue sky
and the geese. I heard their calls and the wind rustling in the grasses. As I
lay there, I thought, “I’m getting what I most needed today.”
I’m lucky to have a prairie nearby, but we all have green space available to
us. We all can look at the sky. As my friend Sherri said, “I’ve never seen
an ugly sky.”
Another day, Margie brought her dog over for a walk around the lake. When we
returned to my house, Leo began rolling around in the grass. First, he rolled
on his back; then he lolled about on his stomach, trying to have every possible
inch of skin touching the grass. Margie said, “If you want to know the
time, ask a dog. They always know, and they’ll tell you the correct time, which
is now, now, now.”
Transcendence can come from work, bliss, or an expanding moral imagination.
I define the moral imagination as the ability to understand how the world looks
and feels to another person. It involves motivation, heart, and imagination. My
respect for the moral imagination leads to a simple value system–good is that
which increases it and evil is that which decreases it.
I believe that the purpose of life is to expand our own moral imagination
and to help others expand theirs, so that our circle of caring, which begins
with our families, eventually includes all living beings.
One day, I played my grandchildren a song called “Hey Little Ant”
by Phillip and Hannah Hoose. This song is a conversation between an ant and a
boy on a playground with his friends watching. He wants to squish the ant just
for fun. But the ant sings that he has a home and a family, too. He sings to
show the boy that his life is as precious to his ant family as the boy’s life
is to his human family. The song ends with a question for the listener to
ponder: “Should the ant get squished? Should the ant go free? / It’s up to
the kid, not up to me. / We’ll leave that kid with the raised-up shoe. / Now
what do you think that boy should do?”
When 9-year-old Kate heard it, she said, “Nonna, I’ll never squish an
ant again.” Aidan, who was 7, also promised to let all ants run free. But
5-year-old Claire said, “Nonna, I still like to squish ants, but I won’t
kill any talking ants.” Sigh. She’ll have a growth spurt soon enough.
Poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “We are each one leaf on the great human
tree.” I hope we can extend that to include all living beings.
Dealing with our global crisis is essentially an ethics problem. If we don’t
expand our moral imaginations, we’ll destroy ourselves. Healing will involve
reweaving the most primal of connections to this sacred web.
Interconnection can be seen as a spiritual belief, especially in Buddhism.
As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “we inter-are.” But it’s also a scientific
fact. Economist Jeremy Rifkin writes, “We are learning that the earth
functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living
being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.” At its core,
interconnection is a survival strategy. Gregory Bateson said it best, “The
unit of survival is the organism and his environment.”
The next great rights battle will be a fight to rescue our beleaguered
planet. It’ll be about air, plants, animals, water, energy, and dirt. We have a
right to a sustainable planet and a future for our grandchildren. And the
meadowlark, the fox, the bull snake, the mosquito, and the cottonwood also have
this right.
We’re in a race between human consciousness and the physics and chemistry of
the earth. We can equivocate, but the earth will brook no compromises.
In our great hominid journey, no one really knows what time it is. We could
be at its end, or we could be at the beginning of a great and glorious turning
toward reconnection and wholeness.
We who are alive today share what Martin Luther King, Jr., called “the
inescapable network of mutuality.” We aren’t without resources. We have
our intelligence, humor, and compassion, our families and friends, and our
ancestry of resilient hominid survivors. We can be restored.
Since the beginning of human time, how many people have loved and cared for
each other in order for us to be alive today? How many fathers have hunted and
fished, fought off predators, and planted grain so that we could breathe at
this moment? How many mothers have nursed babies and carried water so that we
could savor our small slice of time?
We can never know the significance of our individual actions, but we can act
as if our actions are significant. That will create only good on earth.
Besides, what’s our alternative?
As U.S. Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin said, “On my last day on Earth, I’dlike to plant a tree.”
So let’s save and savor the world together.
I wish you well on your journey
