The really inconvenient truth - part I

With ever-increasing attention to environmental crises, be they climate change, habitat destruction or drought, what has been our response? What have we done or failed to do? Why? Have we done anything meaningful? What should we do? This article - divided into two parts - seeks to answer these questions, seeks to look at the big picture - across time, cultures and ideas - of our relationship with nature in an attempt to gain some perspective on where we are and where we are heading.

Part One begins with a snapshot of our current situation and goes on to explore why we are struggling to achieve a good relationship with the natural world, with a particular emphasis on the difficulties posed by our biological traits and physical circumstances. Part Two - to be published in two week’s time - will continue this search but shift emphasis to the dominant ideas and cultural systems governing our lives and will finish with suggestions as to how we might live better on and with this earth.

The Art of Living

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress, as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of it being improved. John Stuart Mill, The Stationary State, 1848.

I wonder what John Stuart Mill would make of the “art of living” at the start of the 21st century? Of our willingness to embrace anything like a steady state? I think he would be shocked to see that what he saw as “scarcely necessary to remark” - the finite nature of the world and the pointlessness and destructiveness of our quest to forever overspill its boundaries - was in no way more accepted in our time than it was in his. Perhaps this is the real, inconvenient truth of our life on this planet.

The complete failure of Mill’s observation to take hold and have effect was brought home to me the other day when I glanced at some old notes and population figures while cleaning out my office on the way to new quarters. Looking at a population chart of the 20th century it struck me what an extraordinary species we are: in my short half-lifetime, commencing in 1960, our population has doubled. Yes, that’s correct, up from three billion to more than six billion.

As extraordinary as this is, it is matched or even exceeded by our growth in consumption of everything from oil, to water, to the simple space we require to live in. Even with the supposed environmental awareness of the 1960s and ’70s behind us, we in Australia blithely increased our house size by 23 per cent from the mid 1980s and by nearly 50 per cent since the 1950s while the number of people per house actually dropped.

Think of the bricks, steel, water and oil consumed to create and furnish these comparative giants, let alone the pollutants released in their construction and operation. Clearly, the art of living, for the average Australian in the last 20 or 30 years, has been the polar opposite of Mill’s steady state: it’s been the “Art” of third and fourth bathrooms, the home cinema, jet ski and gourmet cat food.

Within this headlong rush to expand and consume there have been a few dissenting trends, a slight questioning of the grosser elements of consumption, of selected excesses and problems. Melburnians, affected by drought for the last ten years, have reduced their water consumption by 22 per cent; we largely stopped using ozone-depleting gases in the ’90s once the threat to the atmosphere was known; and we are questioning, at least, whether enjoyment of food is all about gross quantity, or more about food quality and nutrition.

These actions are encouraging, but almost all are minor technical responses to the deep problems of raw growth. Yes, we should use water wisely in Melbourne, but as we account for only 8 per cent of statewide use we are marginal players at best in the water debate; yes, we should use low-flow showerheads and reduce or eliminate plastic bags and put out containers for recycling, but if our 2007 tinkerings are of no greater substance than our brief 1970s dabblings with small cars and native gardens, then it will have all the impact of a garden hose on a bushfire.

At the same time as we take our green calico bags proudly to the supermarket or rail against someone inadvertently hosing their driveway, we champion raw growth. At the same time as the state government runs urban water-saving advertisements on TV and has nifty little CO2 balloons leaking out of home appliances, it also runs ads for provincial Victoria which trumpet, in graphs and images, ever-upward population growth.

Headlines in The Age (e.g. September 22, 2006) warmly congratulate us on yearly population growth of 65,000 (equivalent to a city nearly the size of Ballarat), with the headline: “Victoria Enjoying Population Boom”. Parliament revelled in the State Auditor’s Report in October 2006 because of its population growth figures, and the Federal Treasurer has manufactured a new form of “populate or perish” with his calls to procreate.

The beatific grins with which our politicians greet these figures would seem to indicate that these additional people will, for the first time in human history, not drink water, consume food, live in houses nor produce wastes.

Why, then, has it been so hard for us to address this reality? A powerful and random mix of ideas, systems, inherited traits and circumstance has prevented us from making a good fist of our relationship with the earth.

Evolution

Richard Dawkins, the famous geneticist, coined the term “The Blind Watchmaker” to describe evolution, its intricacy and its sightlessness. It is a term at once powerful and frightening, conveying as it does unconscious, robotic activity of great complexity - but without thought, direction or purpose. And yet, this is exactly what evolution is: it is the process of the present acting on the materials of the past whose “by-product” becomes the future.

Evolution is merely seeking the best fit between the conditions of the present and the organisms handed to it from the past through the process of natural selection and it simply cannot “see” the future, let alone prepare for it.

The consequence of this blindness is a terrible narrowness of perspective, a complete lack of accounting for the future, for other places, species or times, so that we, or any other species for that matter, are rewarded in the short-term for growing, consuming and procreating faster and better than anyone else, regardless of whether this is good for us in the long run.

Just as rodents are driven to massive booms in numbers when conditions are good, and then terrible busts when they overshoot these resources, so too are humans, with culture being our only hope of a brake on the blind force of replicating genes. We are instinctively driven to expand, grow and consume and have, for millennia, been rewarded for doing so.

Evolution will continue rewarding this strategy right up until almost the very end, when we, lemming-like, fall off the metaphorical cliff we have created for ourselves. Can we resist its push, its blind programming that will, in isolation, lead to self-harm?

Scale

Just as evolution is blind to the future, so too does the history of our human experience make it hard for us to see our congested present, let alone our over-full future. For most of human history we have been few and small and, except for the use of fire, relatively powerless against the enormous backdrop of nature. Even by AD1000 the population of England and Wales was only one million people and they could shape the natural world with little more than simple axes, oxen and human muscle-power.

In a local world still populated by wolves and bears, it must have been inconceivable that our actions could harm and degrade such immensity, could even one day affect the weather. How much has this “race memory” lived on in us to the present, no matter how out of proportion it is with our current circumstances?

Consciousness

The frustrating thing in an excursion across cultures, places and times is the fact that, with some notable exceptions, environmental disregard and a poor, unsustainable relationship with nature seem so common, certainly in larger, post hunter-gatherer societies. No matter what the prevailing economic, religious or political system, we seem to be unable to do other than consume or displace. If this is a problem in 16th century Easter Island, 20th century Australia and 21st century Nepal, then we have something fundamental going on, something to do with the very human condition itself.

Perhaps what makes it hard for us to form a more harmonious, reciprocal relationship with the natural world is, paradoxically, our greatest gift: consciousness, or self-awareness. There is a wonderful photograph by Darren Sylvester from an exhibition called “Awkward Silences” where two people stand in the foreground of the photograph with their backs to the camera and gaze upon an enormous, mountain and snow-filled wilderness. They are holding hands and wearing bright yellow parkas. Yes, they are literally and intellectually within this overpowering environment, but emotionally they are not; they are as much apart as a part. There is a terrifying stillness, an “awkward silence” as they stare at nature and nature stares back. They are separate, conscious human beings that must forever live at one-remove from nature; a gift and a curse so beautifully portrayed by the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

This distance that consciousness brings makes nature forever “the other”, an other that can be seen with awe, petulance, cruelty, love and respect, but mostly, it seems, with indifference and alienation.

Let our hopes and dreams be things we can achieve

Next fortnight the exploration of why we have great difficulty in our relationship with the natural world continues, with the focus shifting to the dominant ideas and systems that govern our lives and finishes by suggesting how we might live better.

Read The really inconvenient truth - part II