Unleashing Shakti: our power to transform

The crises of climate change, peak oil, and the food and agrarian crisis are creating an imperative for change, to make a transition to an age beyond oil.

However, if that transition is driven by the same paradigm and powers that created our current climate crisis, it will only perpetuate the problems of ecological non-sustainability and social and economic injustice. Our food is being converted to fuel to run an industrial infrastructure. The lands of the poor are becoming the next oil fields. But there is not enough land to fuel the ever-increasing population of cars and ever-increasing demand for energy.

And when the rights of the poor are taken into account, there is only one way forward - reducing the energy demands of the rich and the non-sustainable patterns of production and consumption that are the legacy of industrialisation and globalisation. The powerful corporations, governments, and elites will, of course, try to avoid any reduction of their profits and power, preferring instead to make the poor pay. A top-down model for sustainability results in pseudo-sustainability and eco-imperialism.

A bottom-up search for sustainability creates an Earth Democracy based on living economies. Unleashing our living but latent energies can create new economic and political possibilities. But recognising the emergent possibilities requires a paradigm shift from a mechanistic worldview and its limited and limiting categories of mechanical energy. The transition to a post-fossil fuel age needs to focus on living energies - our energy to creating living democracies and living economies.

A universe run on the paradigms and fossil fuel energy of the mechanical, industrial age dispossesses and displaces billions. In the final analysis it displaces humanity from being a part of the future evolution of the planet.

The climate change discussion has focused exclusively on two constructs, “growth” and “industrial development”. Both are artificially restrictive. The mechanistic paradigm holds that there must be growth to eliminate poverty, that there must be “industrial development” for the poor of the South to achieve the living standards of the rich of the North. However, both people and nature are being impoverished to make the economy grow. India’s 9 per cent growth is based on pushing small farmers to suicide; uprooting tribes for mines, factories, and Special Economic Zones; and damming every inch of every river. If measured in terms of nature’s economy and people’s economy, this growth would register as destruction.

We need to move beyond the mechanistic paradigms of industrialisation and neoclassical economics if the rights of the poor are to be defended and if future generations are to have a chance to live on this planet.

For too long the very instruments that threaten the poor have been proposed as solutions to poverty. Industrial production systems, which displace people and lay waste to the resources of the earth, are currently reaching the last village, the last mountain in India. And the globalised economy, based on the assumption that perpetual growth is possible, is outsourcing its pollution and resource burden on the poor. To address the issues of energy change and climate change, we need to look at what is happening to people and the soil.

Living systems, living energies

In the dominant paradigm, “energy” refers to oil and coal, which are mined from the earth, shipped thousands of miles, and transformed into electricity to light up neon signs or into fuel to run SUVs. It is fruitful to remember that energy has other meanings and other forms. From Shakti, the generative force of the universe, to the sun that powers our lives, to the water that comes to us as bountiful rain or a flood or a tsunami, to the air and the wind that move the clouds and create the climate. Energy is not just oil and gas. Energy is an all-pervasive element of life.

The broader our paradigm of energy, the wider our choices as human beings. Fossil fuels have fossilised our imagination, our potential, our creativity. We need to break free of this fossilisation to choose life-enhancing pathways for our selves, our species, and the planet.

The mechanistic paradigm has robbed us our freedom and creativities. It has replaced living energy with fossil fuels; the wealth created by nature and people with capital; the freedom of citizens and communities with the coercive power of the corporate state, which imposes the rule of capital in every dimension of our life - the thoughts we think, the food we eat, the settlements we shape.

In this life-threatening period of globalisation and climate crisis, we need to unleash our hidden energies to make a transition to a post-fossil fuel economy. To do so, we need to reinvent democracy.

A renewable-energy economy will only be built through the renewable energy of free and self-organised citizens and communities.

The transition beyond oil is not merely a technological transition - it is above all a political transition in which we stop being passive and become active agents of transformation by recognising that we have the capacity, the energy, and the creativity to make the change.

Life is based on the self-organising energies of the universe, from cells to Gaia, from communities to countries. We as living systems are networks of chemical and energetic flow and transformation.

Thus life is energy - not fossil fuel energy, but living energy.

Rather than bounty, mechanistic science, industrial technology, and the market economy have created scarcity - scarcity of food and water, scarcity of work and energy, scarcity of happiness.

They have worked in concert to increase human dependence on energy from fossil fuels and, in the process, have destroyed life on earth and meaningful, creative work for all. A false paradigm of growth that allows the rich to get richer has sucked out the resources from the planet and the joy of living from humanity.

Reductionist, mechanistic science creates scarcity by blinding itself to the connections that support and maintain the cycle of life, the energy flows that are based on self-organisation. Industrial technology creates scarcity by using ever more resources and energy while externalising the social and ecological costs of its appetite.

By substituting fossil fuels for people (without providing access to sustenance), industrial technology also creates a scarcity of work and well-being.

The market economy creates scarcity by promoting a consumerist culture based on over extraction and over consumption of energy, robbing the poor, other life-forms, and future generations of their share of resources and energy. The vision of those who promote this paradigm is based on the illusion of endless growth.

They don’t acknowledge that endless growth requires endless extraction of resources and endless generation of waste.

The multiple crises of climate insecurity, energy insecurity, and food insecurity create an imperative and an opportunity to transcend the limits of the mechanistic-industrial-capitalist paradigm that has been systematically shrinking our potential even as it peddles progress.

The paths out from this crisis are not being blazed in the boardrooms of the global corporations who dominate our world today and are largely responsible for crimes against nature and humanity.

Industrialisation of food and agriculture has put the human species on a slippery slope of self-destruction and self-annihilation. The movement for biodiverse, ecological, and local food systems simultaneously addresses the crises of climate, energy, and food. Above all, it brings people back into agriculture and reclaims food as nourishment and the most basic source of energy. New ways of thinking and acting, of being and doing, are evolving from the creative alternatives being employed in small communities, on farms, and in cities.

It is this renewable energy of ecology and sharing, of solidarity and compassion, that we need to generate and multiply to counter the destructive energy of greed that is creating scarcity at every level - scarcity of work, scarcity of happiness, scarcity of security, scarcity of freedom, and even scarcity of the future.

Climate chaos, brutal economic inequality, and social disintegration are jointly pushing human communities to the brink. We can either let the processes of destruction, disintegration, and extermination continue unchallenged or we can unleash our creative energies to make systemic change and reclaim our future as a species, as part of the earth family. We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves.