CHARLES EISENSTEIN challenges our current understanding of environmental sustainability, and asks us to reconsider our approaches and practices to environmentalism. He also dares us to realize that it will only work once we become nature lovers.
If we are to focus our attention on a single substance, it should be not carbon dioxide but water. Beyond greenhouse effects, water is crucial in the ways the world maintains conditions for life to thrive. One function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch the animated video about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.
This video, along with companion pieces on the biotic pump and hydrology, comes from an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on Earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.
That is why, if I may be so bold as to make a prediction, that we will see increasingly dramatic derangement of weather patterns over the next few years. Indeed it has already begun. Floods, droughts, fires, anomalous heat, cold, wet, and dry at the wrong time of year will intensify, even in the absence of significant global warming. Such is already the case. I’m sure you’ve noticed. The weather has been weird the last few years; in some places, devastatingly so. Yet, global temperatures (according to the most reliable measure, satellite measurements of the lower troposphere) are about what they were in 2016. The overall trend since measurements began is definitely a warming trend (about 0.13 degrees per decade), but it has not been accelerating.
Herein lies the strategic error. Having hitched the environmental wagon to the global warming horse, what happens if the horse stops running? It won’t mean that our environmental problems will have been solved. It won’t mean the crisis has been averted, if temperatures stop rising. That is because the core of the crisis is not warming, it is ecocide – the killing of ecosystems, the killing of life.
The video and its companion videos illustrate clearly some of the ways this happens. Destroying soil and plant life, and all the other ecological actors they nourish and depend on, leads directly to flood-drought cycles that then get blamed on global warming. The complex, homeostatic feedback loops that maintain stability unravel. The loss of the Amazon can bring drought to Colorado. The loss of rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra might cause drought in China. The loss of the Congo causes floods in Nigeria. Everything is connected to everything else.
Calculating our way to love?
I was hiking yesterday near my home in the Carter Preserve. Dead trees are everywhere. Almost all the oaks are dead. Elsewhere in the state, tracts of old-growth oak have been clearcut to make way for utility-scale solar farms. Let’s put that in quotes, “farms.” Conservationist and entomology professor Douglas Tallamy has this to say, in response to industry advocates who claim that the ecological benefits of solar “farms” outweigh the benefits of a forest.
“Cutting down an existing solar plant, which is a tree, in order to build an artificial one is just ridiculous,” he said. “It’s more than energy. Solar doesn’t feed a single bird, it doesn’t manage the watershed. The only ecological value is capturing energy from the sun, which is what plants do, but it’s not passing it on to rest of the food web. It’s the plants and animals around us that run the ecosystems that we all depend on. I know we want renewable energy, but we’ve got enough land that has already been leveled. Put the solar arrays on rooftops. Put them on all the destroyed properties we already have. Don’t cut down existing forests. It’s totally antithetical to the goals of conservation.”1
What is the basis of industry’s argument that a solar “farm” is better than a forest? Carbon math, that’s what. They add up the sequestration numbers of a mature forest and compare it to the fossil fuel equivalent of the photovoltaic output. This is an extreme yet all-too-common example of what happens when we define “green” in terms of carbon dioxide. Further extremes are on the horizon. What happens if, as some think likely, carbon capture technologies reach economic feasibility? Already, carbon math sometimes brings perverse results, as with nearly useless carbon offsets. Carbon math vastly underestimates the ecological utility of forests, given the role they play in the water cycle and Earth’s physiology. Inevitably, then, when carbon math defines “green,” the forests will suffer.
None of this is to say that greenhouse gas emissions are benign. The degradation of earth’s ecosystemic organs renders her less able to cope with changes in atmospheric gas composition. The additional thermodynamic flux through an already unstable system exacerbates existing instabilities. Moreover, from the living Earth view, there are plenty of reasons to curtail fossil fuel development that have nothing to do with CO2 or methane. Strip-mining, drilling, fracking, burning, offshore oil development, and so forth devastate ecosystems, poison whole landscapes, destroy habitat, acidify rain, contaminate water, and risk catastrophic spills.
The solution, though, is not to shift industrial civilization to another, equally or more damaging energy technology. We have instead to consider matters of scale and purpose. Scale: rooftop solar is different from utility-scale PV fields. Farm-based biogas reactors are different from industrial-scale monocrop biofuel plantations. Micro-hydro is different from mega-dams. In each case, the former fits into an ecological relationship to the specific beings, human and otherwise, of a place. As for purpose, do we really need to produce more and more energy forever? Does it really contribute to human well-being? Bigger houses, more weapons, more stuff, the whole developmentalist technological program that separates us ever-further from life and matter… what does it serve? Ultimately, the “solution” to the ecological crisis is not technical. It comes from reclaiming basic values and changing our relationship to nature.
One no longer needs be a nature lover to
support the aims of environmentalism...
The result is that environmentalism has been
hijacked by people and institutions
who are not nature lovers. We see where it leads:
nature dies in the service of “sustainability.”
Commenting on the clearing of forests to build solar arrays, Tellamy wrote, “It’s totally antithetical to the goals of conservation.” Yes. The environmental movement needs to return to its roots. Conservation does not mean to “use more slowly” or to “save for later.” What the word really means is to serve with. To serve together. To serve what? To serve life. It is a rhetorical error to frame environmentalism in any other way than to make it about love of nature, love of life. No one becomes an environmentalist because of all the money they will save. No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore Earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love. We will not be coerced or bribed into them.
A veteran activist once told me of a meeting he attended in the 1980s in which a group of leading environmentalists decided to adopt the term “sustainability” into their core lexicon. “We wanted to sound scientific,” he said. “We didn’t want to use words like ‘love’ or ‘precious’ and be dismissed as tree-huggers. We wanted to give people a rational, hard-headed reason why we should protect nature. We thought that appealing to the beauty and sacredness of nature wouldn’t reach the people who were destroying it, so we tried to make it about their self-interest instead.”
Around the same time, global warming entered the awareness of the environmental movement, growing over the years to become its defining issue. At first, global warming (now called climate change) seemed a boon to the movement. Now we would be able to force corporations and governments to do the things we’d always wanted, appealing not just to sentiments about nature’s magnificence, and not just to concerns over the health of some subset of people downwind, but to the survival of civilization itself. One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.
Let that last statement sink in. One no longer need be a nature lover to support the aims of environmentalism.
The result is that environmentalism has been hijacked by people and institutions who are not nature lovers. We see where it leads: nature dies in the service of “sustainability.” Forests are cut for solar farms. Landscapes are sacrificed to pit mines to extract lithium, cobalt, silver, rare earths, etc. for decarbonization. There is an awful lot of money in the sustainability industry. It is the same story as before. Meanwhile, we neglect the priorities that are highest from the Living Earth perspective. The energy and funding and attention goes toward “saving the world” by reducing CO2. Neglected in comparison are the sea grass meadows. The peat bogs. The mangrove swamps. The beavers. The elephants. The whales. The sharks. Yet all of these are vital to planetary physiology.
To be continued. Reprinted with permission by the author from https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/how-the-environmental-movement-can#footnote-1-110660236
1 https://ecori.org/2021-6-2-for-better-or-worse-statewide-oak-tree-mortality-changes-ris-landscape/
Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
Charles Eisenstein
