Consider unthinkable: Consume less to survive
Earth’s sustainability near collapse beneath burden of humanity
Aweek ago, we were surrounded by the perennial 9/11 messages of “Never Forget.” It got me thinking once again about how many people realize that one of Osama bin Laden’s foremost goals in attacking our nation may well have been to draw us into war in what is called the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan.
More generally, everyone knows it’s a bad idea to fight a land war on your enemy’s territory in Asia, yet many nations with standing armies sufficiently large to make victory seem plausible attempt it sooner or later, some even four times in 50 years. Note that the first President Bush heeded that lesson by not invading Iraq.
I write in this way not to make anyone feel bad but to highlight the problem that as humans, we often attempt projects we ought to know are wrong or doomed, sometimes because the alternative, the thing that will actually work, is unthinkable.
The last period of serious inflation in this country spanned the 1970s and naturally coincided with a discussion of over consumption of resources. Rather than respect other life by scaling back human consumption of land, water and Earth’s other offerings, we continued to charge forward with economic growth. We lived by draining groundwater continuously and farming unsustainably, thinning the soil and sapping its vitality.
Now Earth’s ability to sustain us is close to collapse beneath the growing burden of humanity.
We find ourselves in a biodiversity crisis as well, most alarmingly manifesting in sharp drops in insect populations, partly because of insecticides and monoculture farming. Humans need insects for decomposition of organic wastes, for pollination, and to serve as food for other wildlife. Our biggest crop is lawns, the fad for which first arose in Britain and France in the 18th century and came to our shores via Jefferson himself and Washington’s landscapers. A taste for dominating Nature seems consistent with the imperialism and slave-holding of early lawn enthusiasts.
Regarding the climate crisis, nobody knows where the point of no return for our civilization lies. We must decarbonize quickly, but doing so will not save our civilization from its other existential crises.
As a person trained in physics and complexity science, I highly recommend the recent documentaries, available on YouTube, on the climate, water, soil, and insect-death crises from Deutsche Welle, a German public broadcaster. I’d suggest starting with “Why Can’t Your Brain Comprehend Climate Change?”
An unthinkable alternative that might have worked in response to the 9/11 attacks was hunting Osama bin
Laden in ways more patient and subtle, and taking the moral high ground by repurposing a large fraction of our vast investment in war to instead promote the interests of beings less powerful than ourselves, both human and nonhuman. This course might have felt riskier, but might in fact have turned out to have been much safer, considering that it also happens to be part of the procedure to save our civilization now. We would simply have been a few decades late in getting started, instead of another two besides.
Just like the inflation of the 1970s, Sept. 11, 2001, was a wake-up call, but we continued to pursue economic growth. The solution to all our troubles is now, and has always been, to realize that God helps those who help themselves by helping the less powerful. The most important way we can do this is by consuming less. One locally popular god who lived child-free and poor recommended against pursuing wealth. If enough people heed this call, low-consumption lifestyles will cease to be despised. People will live happier lives and our civilization may survive.