End of nature?

American environmentalist Bill McKibben recently finished a speaking tour in Australia, lecturing to packed theatres in Melbourne and Sydney and doing an assortment of media engagements.

McKibben wrote The End of Nature, one of the seminal books of the environment movement, in the 1980s. He’s learned, passionate and inspiring. His message, much like that of Al Gore in The Inconvenient Truth, is that humanity is leading the planet down the path of catastrophe unless there is a great shift away from fossil fuels towards an economy powered by renewable energy.

McKibben founded 350.org, a worldwide group that is campaigning against carbon pollution and the coal, oil and gas industries, and for an ecologically balanced future. I applaud his work and that of the environment movement generally, even as I think the movement could benefit from a wider perspective that is not so bound to the old world view dominated by modern science and technology.

I once heard Australian academic David Tacey say something like: “Environmentalists are appealing to people’s conscience, when what is needed is a change in consciousness.” By that, Tacey was saying that saving the planet requires a fundamental shift in perspective towards an awareness in which we see ourselves as part of nature, not separate from it. According to Tacey, our materialist culture, sprung from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, cannot solve today’s ecological problems. That’s because humanity’s perceived independence from nature and our dominance and control of it are central to the Enlightenment world view, and you cannot fix something with the very tools that caused the problem in the first place.  

While Tacey is right, I believe groups like 350.org implicitly lead towards the new consciousness to which he refers. That’s because they are aligned to something that teachers of mine have described as “the will to good”. This is the fundamental propensity towards life – its development and furtherance. The will to good is the energy that propels the work of spirit in the world and it’s connected intimately to the zeitgeist or spirit of the time. The spirit of our time is shifting towards a culture of connection, oneness and integration with nature, a culture with strong feminine energy in which we don’t abandon the lessons of the past but move beyond the narrow and ego-centred materialism that’s been our lot for some time.     

That said, I think there is a need for greater understanding within movements for change of the implications of their work, so as to better facilitate the new dawning consciousness. For example, the desire for human civilisation to shift to renewable energy is problematic unless we take into account our overall footprint on the planet. That means tackling the difficult issues of consumption, economic growth, industrialisation and population. In the old paradigm of separation from nature, humanity stands apart and looks objectively at “the natural world”. Nature is an “other” with which we have no intrinsic life bonds and that we can attempt to manage or “fix”. Ecological consciousness requires us to be fully present “in” nature, to realise that we are an expression of life on the planet and that everything we do must be aligned in accordance with life. Fundamentally, we have to return to balance.  

There is a mistake in the environment movement, I believe, in its continuing emphasis on reason. Appeals to reason are continually made for governments to change their policies and individuals to change their behaviour: if we don’t, it is said, the consequences will be dire. The truth is that if humanity acted on the basis of what is right and sensible, we would have changed direction a long time ago and be living a far different reality. Psychology right back to Freud at the start of the 20^th century established that conscious reason constituted only a small part of the psyche, the bulk of people’s motivations coming from a vast unconscious reservoir of emotions, urges and desires. Humans are largely non-rational beings, and environmentalism needs to acknowledge this.

Despite its current close connection with science, the environment movement is at heart a romantic movement. The kind of science that emerges in the new consciousness will be holistic and far more sophisticated and evolved than the modern, mechanistic version of it that still holds in the popular mind. Separative masculine objectivity will not support action to protect and repair the planet – we need to build an emotional connection with nature. That means an experience of oneness, of direct communion and active being in nature, of getting to know its cycles and myriad processes in our lives. As we become fully present in nature, fully alive in it and it fully alive in us, so human society radically changes. When we find meaning in nature and our systems change accordingly, human society itself becomes less alienated, more connected and meaningful. 

I think one other consideration is important in moving to an ecological consciousness, and that is process. Among people who are sensitive and aware, the environmental crisis is increasingly leading to grief and despair. The public appeals to “act now before it’s too late” that have been around since the 1970s are starting to be replaced by an acceptance that it is, in some sense, “too late”. Catastrophic weather is occurring and sea levels are on the rise. The Earth will warm to a dangerous degree, and it is rather the most extreme levels of danger that are now to be avoided.  A sense of failure is creeping in among those who for years have fought for the environment, a feeling that life on the planet will be changed irreversibly for the worse.

There’s a goal orientation at work here. On the level of individual psychology, goals can be useful and important in a person’s life, but they are ultimately meaningless. What’s important is what is learnt and what changes along the way to the goal, not whether the goal is achieved; it’s the process that counts. So too in a collective sense: even when the goal is as huge as saving the planet, the meaning is in the process and not the destination. There are immeasurable benefits when we direct ourselves towards furthering the cause of life, even if our tangible goals are not reached. Ultimately, we can’t fully measure the effects of our actions as they ripple outwards in time and space, in material and non-material dimensions. The planet may indeed become mostly uninhabitable, but this will be merely yet another phase in its long history; eventually, slowly but inevitably, new life will emerge in the truly breathtaking evolution of this beautiful rock, the Earth.