Sustainability is Forever

So Todd came back last night. I was online, checking out some star charts, trying to figure out whether that weird bright light in the western sky was Venus or the mothership come to take me home, when a yellow sticky popped up right in the middle of the screen.

so lets get cracking we dont have any time to waste lets get that doc out and wake people up and get them moving lets solve these problems

“Where’ve you been, Todd?” I typed.

Turns out Todd went to YouTube to see the What a Way to Go trailers and ended up watching every last piece of video there. That explains his long absence. “Did you read my blogs where I told your story?” I asked.

yes yes I did but thats old news thats the past and this is now and right now we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work

I sighed. As predictable as was his shame was this new energy to “get cracking”. I’ve seen it over and over. I went through it myself.

“What is it you think we should be doing?”

Todd had apparently been doing his homework. He papered my desktop with stickies:

we need new legislation new rules that kyoto thing and carbon caps and biofuels and hybrid cars and cfls and carbon offsets and theres people figuring out how to store carbon underground how to make hydrogen cars and cold fusion and clean coal and theres a new generation of nuclear theres catalogs full of green products now and people are building green homes and green schools and green businesses and wind and solar and geothermal and algae and and and theres people figuring out how to block the sun and new genetically modified crops and tar sands and oil from garbage and theres new technologies like nano particles we dont even know whats possible yet were smart and can innovate like nobodys business but we have to stop pretending everything is fine and knuckle down

“Well, you’re an American, that’s for sure,” I joked.

what does that mean

“You have a tendency to jump to solutions before you really understand the problem.”

what the heck are you talking about climate change is the problem peak oil is the problem mass extinction is the problem you said so yourself I watched your damned documentary six times you said it yourself

“Those are the symptoms, Todd. Symptoms of an underlying cultural and spiritual disconnection from reality so profound it makes my head spin and my heart melt.”

so why cant we get cracking and make some changes anyways why not build wind power and green houses and all of that now while we figure out this disconnection stuff

“Because it won’t work. And because most of it will just make things worse. Most of these solutions arise from only looking at a part of the whole. Technofixes will be difficult to implement when energy prices skyrocket, when water fails, when ecosystems collapse. Energy alternatives all seem to fall way short, and most come with fairly high environmental costs attached.”

“Ultimately, nothing is sustainable inside of a growing system. Nothing. We can be as green as Kermit, but if we’re still growing - growing the population, growing the economy, growing the American lifestyle - it will not be sustainable.”

“It’s not enough to just do less damage. Sustainability has to mean forever if it’s to mean anything at all. Sustainable for a while will simply not cut it. That’s what we’ve been doing. Civilization could be sustained for a while. But it’s a culture that fouls its own nest. It has always been unsustainable. Our present situation was built into the equation from the get-go. It just took a while to get here, because the Earth is so large.”

Todd tossed a sticky onto the screen but left it blank. I waited. After a minute he said this: so what are we supposed to do smarty

“There’s a first step we have to take,” I typed, “before we do anything. We have to sit with the situation and feel it. We have to feel our fear, our loss, our grief, our shame, our helplessness, and our despair. We have to stare the beast down, eye to eye. We have to witness the destruction of the planet by the hands of this culture.”

I don’t understand

Deena Metzger said it beautifully in her new book, From Grief Into Vision. In her poem Pelicans in the Midwest she wrote:

Like the pelican, we look down at our chicks and watch them die. We observe helplessly – that is our calling. If we pretend for a moment that there is something we can do, we will have lost contact with Pelican mind. Making this connection, difficult as it may seem, is what we can do. So then let us observe hopelessly as they must do. You – I – we must do this. We must be helpless for a long time and then, afterwards, when we pick up our lives, we will not pick up anything at all that will do harm. We will not weigh one harm against another, or one creature, or one species. We will not choose the immediate over the long run or this moment over the future. We will not choose the lesser of two evils; we will not be expedient or resigned. We will not.

Todd popped up again: this is what you talk about at the end of the doc right

“It is. Until people sit with hopelessness and helplessness and grief for a long, long time, I don’t think we can trust their solutions. Once they do, once they truly understand how hopeless the situation is, and once they’ve drunk deeply of their own grief and despair, then they can begin to speak of action in a sane and helpful way. Many of the people in our documentary have gone through that process. That is why they are qualified to say what they say.”

Todd posted another sticky: when I sat in that cage I was a pig it hurt so much I could hardly breathe it was days and weeks it hurt so bad I remember one day feeling like I was both a pig and a man I was in both bodies I was alive I could feel the life in my veins my cells my lungs my mind it felt like I was glowing with life there was nothing I could do no hope I was stuck there was nothing I could do but I was alive and its strange but it felt good I felt good even then I felt alive and life was good it lasted only for a moment

I started to type a response but Todd added one last sticky: I was no longer civilized I was an animal I was alive I was alive and I wanted to keep on living

Todd stopped and I laughed with delight. He’d nailed it. A ten point oh. Degree of difficulty: off the charts.

I went back out to look at Venus.

Perhaps it’s too soon for the mothership.