What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

Recently, Tim sent me an email with this subject line:

Significant climate tipping points have been passed.

I opened the email to find an article about the most recent “comments and projections” by James Hansen. Hansen, you may know, is perhaps the most famous NASA climate change scientist. He’s the man who testified before Congress twenty years ago that the planet was warming and that people were the source of that warming. He’s the man who was pressured by senior officials at NASA, at the behest of the current administration, to tone down his reports about the impacts of climate change. Thankfully he seems to have resisted that pressure.

I read the article and then I read a related article by Bill McKibben. Hansen says, and McKibben underscores, that there is a critical maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heed to prevent climatic catastrophe. That number, he says, is between 300 and 350.

In earlier years of climate change awareness experts were shooting for limits of 450 to 550 ppm, with the hope that those were realistic limits we could manage. But now Hansen is saying the number is much lower, between 300 and 350, if we want to avert catastrophe. Things are melting and weather patterns are changing much faster than anyone has predicted. So we need to get even more serious about reducing the carbon in our atmosphere. Three hundred fifty is the number, the number everyone should know, says McKibben in the Washington Post. While nothing is sure, McKibben says, “at least we are honing in on the right number.”

So, now, we are looking at the right number. That’s good. We’re on the right track. Can you guess how many ppm of CO2 are in the atmosphere now? Slightly below 350? Slightly above?

We’re at 383 parts per million and counting, well past the number Hansen suggests is critical. We are past it by a lot. We were at 325 parts per million in 1970! Um, I don’t think we can just suck all that carbon back out, ask billions of people not to have been born, tear down all of those new suburban developments, return to non-fossil-based agriculture, and innocently pretend it’s thirty years ago.

My stomach is tight. So is my chest. I tell myself to remember to breathe. While I still can.

We’re already past the number? Wait, I knew this. I’ve known this for a long time. With my head. But it took that email from Tim. It took Hansen saying it. Now my body is catching up. My gut and chest now register it.

We’re already past the number.

Carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, nor even significant trend down, in fossil fuel consumption, since An Inconvenient Truth was released in May of 2006.

In fact, according to the Energy Information Administration:

“World oil consumption is expected to rise by 1.6 million bbl/d (barrels per day) in both 2008 and 2009 compared with the estimated 1 million bbl/d increase recorded last year. The larger volume gains expected in 2008 and 2009 compared with 2007 mainly reflect higher consumption expected in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), particularly Europe, where weather factors constrained oil consumption last year.”

I’m letting all this sink in, deeper than ever. It doesn’t feel good but I’m committed to what Scott Peck wrote in The Road Less Traveled is the hallmark of mental health: dedication to the truth.

Then I get stopped. My head starts to feel kind of cottony inside. My stomach gets watery. All of this happens as I contemplate the fact that Hansen and McKibben say it’s not too late. They say: All we have to do is stop using fossil fuels.

McKibben writes:

“Does that mean we’re doomed? Not quite. Not any more than your doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high means the game is over. Much like the way your body will thin its blood if you give up cheese fries, so the Earth naturally gets rid of some of its CO2 each year. We just need to stop putting more in and, over time, the number will fall, perhaps fast enough to avert the worst damage.

That “just,” of course, hides the biggest political and economic task we’ve ever faced: weaning ourselves from coal, gas and oil. The difference between 550 and 350 is that the weaning has to happen now, and everywhere.”

Spinning, I ask myself, “What would that take, now and everywhere?”

It would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere.

I mean…think about it. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. There are questions about whether hybrid cars take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels. When McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization.

For the sake of the rest of the community of life, all of the endangered other species, all of the threatened ecosystems and life support systems they depend on, I’m okay with that. But who thinks that’s going to happen voluntarily?

My head spins some more. Part of me seeks retreat into denial. So I go look for more numbers.

Here are some numbers from the Energy Information Administration Excel spreadsheet for world energy use from 1980 to 2005.

Ponder these:

In 1980 world petroleum use was 63 million barrels a day.
In 2005 world petroleum use was 83.5 million barrels a day.

During the same years, natural gas consumption went from almost 53 trillion cubic feet to almost 104 trillion cubic feet per day.

Coal use went from 5 billion to almost 6.5 billion short tons per day.

I strain to get a picture in my head of how much energy stuff, just the sheer volume of matter, those numbers represent. And I sit with the fact that those are PER DAY numbers. I can’t even imagine what 104 trillion cubic feet of natural gas would look like. Per day. Day after day after day.

But Hansen and McKibben say it’s not too late. All we have to do is stop. Now and everywhere.

I mean, I agree. We have to stop.

But would it be okay if I stop tomorrow? Because I’m not quite ready. I still buy food at the co-op that I still drive to. I still get firewood delivered by a nice guy who still uses gasoline in his chain saw and delivers it in his Ford truck, which also still uses gasoline. I still sort of need my laptop. And the lamp behind my head with the compact fluorescent bulb. I still use that to read by. And to be honest I’ve never grown more than 1% of my own food. My water is pumped to my sink from a couple of hundred feet below ground into a pressured tank. Electricity that comes from a huge power grid, partially powered by coal, is used to run the pump and pressurize the tank so I can just turn on the faucet when I need it.

I’m not quite ready to stop using fossil fuels. Could I wait a day or two while I prepare?

I think the truth, as Daniel Quinn told us when we interviewed him for What A Way To Go, is this: there is a secret plan in place. I t’s a secret plan that we don’t talk about because, well, it’s a secret, and we want to keep the secret. That’s what we’ve been taught to do.

This is the secret plan: we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore.

That’s the plan. And that’s what person after person told us when we interviewed them for What A Way To Go. We asked everyone we talked to, “What’s it going to take for people to change?” And what person after person said was, “It’s going to take a catastrophe. It’s going to take a catastrophe before people will wake up.”

I just turned off the lamp behind my head. The room is dark at this time of the morning, but seeing the words on the screen of my laptop really does not require the light behind my head. I can go without these carbon-fueled electrons this morning.

This is all staggering. And confounding. And I’m not the only one with cotton in my head and a knot in my gut when I read these things. My question is: why do James Hansen and Bill McKibben and others say, “It’s not too late?” That assertion, it seems to me, just intensifies the cotton effect, the numbing, the craziness.

If they said, “It is too late,” what would happen?

I’m going to try it. It’s too late.

There I said it. It’s too late. It’s too late to get out of catastrophe. There’s no way this civilization is going to grind to a halt, get off the fossil fuel train, reduce the population voluntarily by 3/4 and start growing food sustainably, without catastrophe. We’re in for it. And we don’t even know what we’re in for.

My son, Andy, who holds together the business end of VisionQuest Pictures in a tiny room on the other side of this funky recycled house-turned-duplex-turned-cooperative-living/ business place, and Tim and I talk about the advisability of making such statements. We want this family business to succeed. And we know that saying it’s too late doesn’t sell DVDs to a large potential audience of people who listen complacently to smart, white, male authority figures who say it’s not too late. Those people don’t want to hear it’s too late.

But this is where Tim and I drew our line in the sand. This is where our inner “Cheyenne dog soldiers” placed our picket pins. We can’t pretend to not see what we see. So Andy and Tim and I are coming to terms with the idea that What A Way to Go is not going to be a blockbuster. At least not this month. Things still look too good out there, in spite of the volatility of the stock market. It’s too soon for What A Way To Go to be the poster child of progressive documentaries. That would require ruthlessly honest viewers, willing to challenge the American way of life beyond our choice of light bulbs. That’s not easy for people trapped in this culture. But the feedback we get, from those rare but growing numbers who are screaming for some sanity in the face of 383 ppm, is that watching the movie, talking about it all, facing into it, finally, is a balm. The cotton starts to loosen in their heads and they start to feel related to reality. They start to feel sane.

And that’s why we do this. That’s why we look at things exactly as they are, even when what we see feels at times so grim, so dire, so irreversible. We do this, we look at it, we talk about it, and we write about it, because it’s our best approximation of reality. And I want to live fully. I want to live consciously. I want to live with full integrity, sanely. And if I want those things I have to be related to life as it is, not life as I wish it were. I have to look at things exactly as they are. And so do you, if that’s what you want.

“Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.”
~ M.Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

I was doing some research in preparation for a retreat Tim and I facilitated. The organizer of the retreat, blessings on him, called a gathering with the intention to create such a strong and cohesive group that we would be able to enter into deep dialogue about these issues, to step out of denial, to look at, and feel, things exactly as they are. Unless we do this we will not be effective in our lives. We will not be fully ourselves, not in our intimate relations with family and friends, not in our work as helpers, visionaries, catalysts, healers, nor in relationship with the larger community of people and planet.

Wikipedia had some great information about psychological defenses. Denial and two others form a triad of “Level 1 Defense Mechanisms.” The other two are distortion and delusional projection. The projection in this case shows up as the tendency to fear and label people who look at reality as “negative” or “doom-sayers.” Wikipedia says that the combination of those three can

“permit one to effectively rearrange external reality and eliminate the need to cope with reality.”

The denial member of that triplet is defined as:

Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening; arguing against an anxiety provoking stimuli by stating it doesn’t exist; resolution of emotional conflict and reduction of anxiety by refusing to perceive or consciously acknowledge the more unpleasant aspects of external reality.

So this morning, as I reflect on the article about James Hansen’s most recent comments and on Bill McKibben’s report about those comments, I can’t help but think about denial as a psychological defense. These questions go through my head:

When James Hansen and Bill McKibben say, “It’s not too late,” are they not supporting all of America to embrace denial?

Are statements that suggest it’s not too late not an example of refusing to accept external reality because that reality seems too threatening?

Are such statements not made to argue against a stimulus that provokes high anxiety: the stimulus being the idea that it IS too late?

Are these statements not used to “resolve” our conflicted emotions by supporting Americans to refuse to perceive or consciously acknowledge these unpleasant aspects of external reality?

Are our best and brightest scientists and journalists, Hansen and McKibben being two representatives of those, caught in denial themselves? Or are they just stumped about what to say, what to do, how to be with all of this?

My chest and gut get tight as I articulate these questions. Am I allowed to do this? Do I get to ask these questions? Am I breaking an unspoken rule when I question if renowned White Male Authorities could be caught in denial?

I have a lot of compassion for being caught in denial. At this very moment, in order to ease the discomfort in my chest and gut, I am tempted to run for denial myself. I’m tempted to defer to White Male Authority, especially to two of the best, brightest, and highest intentioned of the bunch. I’m tempted, at least momentarily, to judge as faulty or misguided my own perceptions and analysis.

But I don’t want to do that. I want to be intimately connected to reality. So I decide to look at more data. Data always helps me remember that just because I’m female doesn’t mean I’m wrong, or crazy, or overreacting.

Here’s the data I look at: net geothermal, solar, wind, wood and waste electric power went from 195 billion kilowatt hours in 1980 to a whopping 370 billion in 2005.

Wow. Almost double in 25 years. Is there a bright spot here? Those look like big numbers and a large increase. Maybe that’s good. I wonder how those numbers compare with total fossil fuel energy use.

Whoops. Fossil fuels actually provide 93% of the world’s energy use. Renewables provide only about 7%.

Consider what kind of ramping-up, now and everywhere, would be required to move from the fossil fuel based civilization we have to a cleaner, renewable energy based civilization. Consider how much recycling of our current infrastructure would have to take place. Consider how much time and energy it would take to revision, rebuild, and retrofit what we have now into a non-fossil fueled operation?

I don’t know how much it would take, or how long, but I know it is a lot. Like most of the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, the billions of barrels of oil, the billions of tons of coal, consumed daily. And, while we may have a lot of technological know-how, I don’t see how we have the time, energy, political will, cultural awareness or deep understanding of ecosystems, currently, to pull it off to avoid catastrophe. We are on the edge of the cliff pretending we can fly. While we have defined the physics of flying, we have not grown wings.

When I let the anxiety rise, when I resist the move to denial, when I sit with all of this, I know we aren’t going to sprout wings and fly out of all of this. I know the chances of “It’s not too late,” being really true are about the same as the chances that Jenny, the 14-year-old Springer spaniel that we buried a month ago, will magically appear at the door scratching and whining and wagging to be fed. I can want that. I can imagine it. I can even wish for it. But to hold onto that as a real possibility, rather than to face and grieve her loss, is to be in a severe, pathological form of denial.

I suspect most people, down deep, when they aren’t drunk with denial, or shopping, or television, know this also. Collectively, we know the secret plan and we know it can’t go on forever. What we don’t know is what IS going to happen.

So, if not denial, then what?

Pema Chodron, author of The Places That Scare Us: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times, begins her book with this idea:

“…we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.” (p.3)

I would add that we have this choice only if we are willing to be related to “what’s so,” to reality. When we are not in reality we are caught in denial or some other form of psychological defense. Defense is always about hardening ourselves off. It’s about blame, resentment, or frozen, unfelt fear, fantasy, projection.

Tim and I talk a lot about the ruling paradigm of this culture, “the paradigm of domination and control.” We use those words to assess various approaches to the current situation. As Tim said in the voice-over in What A Way To Go,

“What we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. We’re going to have to try something else.”

The circumstances we living beings of this planet face are about as scary as I can imagine. Can we allow these circumstances to soften us so that we become less resentful and afraid, kinder and more open? Can we step out of the paradigm of domination and control? Can we let go of denial and face into things exactly as they are?

Life has been inviting me, using the knots in my chest and gut, to “try something else.” I am not willing to use pharmaceuticals, or even herbs, as a technofix for the discomfort. And my favorite distractions have not worked. But in the last two weeks there are three things that have been extremely helpful. They all involved softening, letting down my defenses, and letting myself feel.

A couple weeks ago I took some dried garden sage to the edge of what this drought has left of the pond that lies a few hundred feet from our house. I lit the sage to let the sweet, smoky fragrance remind me of times I’ve spent on longer retreats I’ve made to the woods. As the smoke swirled about in the breeze, I lay down and I cried. I asked for help. Out loud. I asked the ancestors. I asked the unseen forces that might be waiting, wanting to help. I asked any and all creative forces in the universe. I admitted, again out loud, that I am not doing well. I felt the fear and the helplessness in my body. I surrendered denial. I surrendered control. I want to join the winning side and I have a feeling that ultimately this culture of control and domination is not on that side. I wept gently and sincerely. This is part of what it takes to step out of the paradigm of domination and control. The willingness to surrender.

You know, it wasn’t that bad, the surrendering and the weeping. It never is when I remember to do it. It’s actually pretty easy and sweet and simple. It just takes admitting what’s so: I’m just one human being. I’m limited. I’m doing my best. Many, many of us are doing our best, and we’re still collectively drowning in carbon dioxide, facing economic and environmental collapse, while the growth machine continues to struggle to ramp up production and population.

When I sat up my face was wet with tears. I looked out across the pond. Sunlight reflected off the tiny ripples there like nothing I have seen before. What appeared was more beautiful than the most beautiful fireworks I’ve ever seen. I saw thousands of tiny, crystalline flames dancing in ecstatic patterns before my eyes. I’ve never seen anything like it. I was stunned at this sight.

I was not so stunned of course that my mind did not theorize about this phenomenon. Was it the chemical composition of my tears that was creating this? Was it the angle of the sun in relation to my position on the bank of the pond? Was it some weird atmospheric condition brought on by the drought in the Southeast? But miraculously, even in the throes of my mind’s compulsive theorizing, the phenomenon persisted.

Perhaps it was my ancestors speaking, revealing their love?

After the pond experience I felt less anxious for a day or so. Apparently the lesson is not quite learned however as the anxiety returned full force. I complained to Tim. I journaled about it. Mostly my knuckles just turned white. When I went for acupuncture, though I had not told her anything about this, my saintly and apparently psychic acupuncturist said in her Israeli-accented English,

“You have substantial worries and you have insubstantial worries. You know what I’m saying here? You must work on these. You must let go these insubstantial worries and you must deal with the substantial worries. Do you understand this?”

I understood. The substantial worries are about the planet, the insubstantial ones are more petty. Those are just garden-variety neuroses, like worry about whether people will like and approve of me; like if it’s okay to question renowned White Male Authority figures.

That evening Tim and I took one of our late night walks. We bundle up to walk the road, to talk, and to look at constellations, the moon, and the dozen or more blinking lights from airplanes coming and going, even late at night, from the Raleigh/Durham airport. I truly will not miss the airplanes in the night sky if I’m around when we stop using fossil fuels.

As we walked I noted again the knot in my stomach, the “substantial and insubstantial worry,” that I need to let go of, or deal with. I noticed it, and then I stopped. I lay down on the bank next to the road. Tim’s gotten used to this kind of behavior and seems to like me anyway. As I lay on the ground, I looked up at the stars, and I cried. As I had earlier in the week, I asked for help and admitted how difficult this all is, this looking head-on at reality, this mission to encourage others to do the same.

Just as it had been with the pond experience, it wasn’t so bad, this surrendering, this asking for help. I admit it’s a little awkward. I have no generations of conscious spiritual tradition to back me up in this. This practice is based on a twelve-day intensive workshop in the wilderness of Tennessee and several individual retreats on my own, away from all things man-made. So it’s largely intuitive what I do. And I still feel awkward. I’m glad Tim doesn’t laugh at me.

It occurs to me that this is what it means to pray. It is a mighty step out of the paradigm of domination and control and a giant step toward the paradigm of humble relationship. If as a culture we took this journey, step by step, we would routinely act with humility. The precautionary principle would be the eleventh commandment. We would not have collectively fucked up like we have, if we had already taken these steps.

In the end what I do as an individual is engage in active, physical, vocal acknowledgment of what is: of my feelings, of my limitations in the face of climate change tipping points, of my utter not-knowing what to do. We need to do this collectively, now and everywhere.

I didn’t feel immediately better after. This time there were no visible fireworks, at least not on the outside. But I slept well that night and, come morning, I felt lighter. I felt adequate to the day. It was easier to approach what was on my plate creatively, with peacefulness. The calm lasted a while.

And then I read the article Tim emailed me. And I read the article by Bill McKibben. And I felt sad and sick and a little crazy. The White Guys didn’t validate my experience.

You need to know I have nothing but respect for James Hansen’s scientific work and for his courage in continuing to report accurately on the facts of the situation. And I have nothing but respect for Bill McKibben’s journalism. But I have to say, they come from White Guy Culture: the dominant European culture of progress and control, based on unexamined and pervasive assumptions about the superiority and near omnipotence of humans, and especially of white, male authority.

They are White Guys. And like most white guys, they’ve likely been brought up to feel like they have to fix it or, in this case, to at least suggest that it can be fixed by other White Guys.

We know that men in White Guy Culture routinely jump into “fix it” mode. We joke about it. We observe it whenever their wives or sisters or mothers are sad or angry or scared. It seems to be just part of the deal, of being a guy, a white guy, a well-educated, privileged, white guy. They are supposed to be able to fix it. It’s not all bad. There’s a very good part of it. At root it comes from a genuine desire to help, to serve, to protect. But as women will attest, men’s attempts “to fix” all too often end up offending and missing the point. And those attempts usually make things worse. The attempt “to fix” cuts short what women, in their own profound wisdom, know: that they need to feel, and that they need to feel deeply. It is through feeling that they arrive at wisdom.

What women need, and of course what men need as well, is to be supported to feel deeply, and to be respected as they work their way into and through those feelings. They need to be supported to trust their capacity to feel and to find the wisdom and healing that comes of that.

Maybe Mother Earth doesn’t want to be fixed. Maybe She wants to be heard and respected.

Collectively we have a similar situation on a grand scale here. Our Mother is hurting. She’s wounded. She loses children at the rate of 200 or more species a day. She’s being bled to death and her blood is burned to create a great cloud of pollution. She’s sending all kinds of signals that things are way out of whack. She’s in the throes of huge feeling about what’s been done to her over the course of industrial civilization. It’s not pretty.

In the face of that, White Guys feel like they need to fix it. They feel compelled to say, “It’s not too late. We can fix it.” Because if they don’t do that, they don’t know what to do. They would have to just sit and feel too.

Sit. Be still. And listen. For you are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof. ~ Rumi

Last night, after I put down my current Orson Scott Card novel, as I shut my eyes and sealed out the chilly air with the wool comforter around my shoulders, a great wave of sadness and helplessness came over me. Again I cried. I cried and I prayed.

“Help us. We’ve really fucked up. We really have. Help us. Help us be humble and open in the face of this. Help us respond in sane, heartfelt ways. Help us learn what we need to learn so we don’t ever do this again. Help us. We are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof and we don’t know what we’re doing.”

I wiped away the tears with the edge of the sheet and resealed the comforter around my shoulders. And then I drifted off to sleep.

Today I have the courage to say that I believe the most important thing we can do in the face of the current situation is to sit still. We have really fucked up. We are drunk on technology and insane with the power it has given us to turn fossil fuels and the very body of the planet into tons of meaningless toys. We need to sit still, sober up, and look at this.

We need to surrender to the reality of what we’ve collectively done and become utterly willing to learn.

I also have the courage, and it takes some, to say that it is vitally important that White Guy culture look to women to take the lead in all of this. While women have been wounded by this culture, we generally carry less of the wounding that prevents things like surrender, prayer, tears, and genuine humility. It is critically important for women to step more deeply into our wisdom, the wisdom of our bodies and our feelings. We all need to sit, to become still, to become fully sober, thoughtful, and willing to grieve. Men need women to step up and lead in this process. And women need men to acknowledge them and to support them to do so.

This has been, in microcosm, the course of my partnership with Tim. When we first met I took the lead in the scary work of unveiling all of my feelings to him. Over a period of several months, early in our relationship, I opened up, soberly and thoughtfully. I grieved deeply about past disappointments. I felt my fears, risked my sadness and carefully shared my anger. Then it was Tim’s turn to do the same. Being a man, and having had less opportunity to do this kind of surrender into feeling, he took a long turn at it. Now we pass the stick, the talking stick, the crying stick, the ranting stick, the praying stick, back and forth, with great regularity and more grace than I had imagined possible. We feel like we’ve made great progress between us in stepping out of the paradigm of domination and control.

There is now an inside joke in the tag line for What a Way To Go:

A middle-class white guy comes to grips with peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, population overshoot, and the demise of the American lifestyle.

The inside joke is that Tim is no longer a White Guy. He resigned, went AWOL, jumped ship, escaped. He deconstructed the prescription “Big boys don’t cry,” and claimed his right as an adult male to grieve and rage, to feel afraid and awestruck. And to surrender his white guy ego to something greater.

This is the work. To recognize we are drunk. We are at the edge of the roof. It’s time to be still and look at things exactly as they are.

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