acting like the world revolves around us, as a guiding pattern in dominant culture, is imploding before our eyes. we can spend a great deal of energy trying to fix what’s broken, to patch up the parts with solar panels and electric cars, swapping out a bit here for a less destructive bit over there, offsetting. we can rage that so much of our culture as a system, which yields such suffering, is broken, and must be fixed, and that someone must be held responsible.
but the system is not actually broken. it is working exactly as it was designed. we’re extremely gifted, extremely good at what we do, just like every part of life on earth down to the tiniest cell.
the system is functioning as intended, it is, in fact, spectacularly good at what it’s designed to do. extraction, exploitation, raising and educating an abstracted, disconnected, malleable workforce, maintaining the dominance of a few over the many, colonising new territory and its beings to remake it in its own image. it is wildly successful. as with a sleek, fast car —- which you may admire as it passes, but you may not safely cross its path any longer —- the only place to be is in the driver’s seat. and that place is reserved for the top of the hierarchy. we can work hard to get more diversity at the top, but it’s still a hierarchy, it’s still the same structure, enacting the same story.
if we thought ecological collapse was some kind of accident, or that better people would not have done this, do swap them out, let’s be very clear. ecological collapse is the logical effect built into the design. it is the end of this particular story expressed in culture and in our relationship to the material — our economy. we see the pattern enacted, repeatedly, on tiny scales, we’re surprised that wherever it is applied it yields the same result. yet that’s how it is built to function. it isn’t a failure when industrial capitalism destroys a river and its communities and moves on to the next river to exploit. that’s it succeeding.
now the dominant story is succeeding into its own demise, and all of us with it, because this story always needs another colony and the planet is nearly wholly colonised. bleakness and despair begins even to touch the drivers themselves, though some may be holding onto some idea of a better afterlife. the final colony, i expect. greater and lesser angels, heaven and hell all over again.
we really are tremendously skilled at living out a pattern at the greatest scale, repeating from the microscopic detail. the powerful have known spectacular success in the story of extraction and domination. see, the existence of billionaires. we are witnessing that story reach its finale on a grand stage now, so it does seem a very good time to accept some realities.
that story structure is of hierarchy, dominance, exploitation and extraction, in which the hero moves on, necessarily empire building because the story requires extraction to the point of annihilation, and needs to find fresh territory. on occasion we may be lulled into thinking technology will save us, but let’s see clearly. how many proposed solutions are just another vision of exploit and extract. it could be slaves and sugar, mountain tops and mines, forests and monocrops. the model remains. we can swap out whomever and whatever we like, we’re still telling the same story.
the thing is that we move so fast and intensely now, we all feel it, so the invasion-colonisation-exploitation-extraction-destruction model is reaching its ends so rapidly, perhaps the more comfortable among us will begin to see it vividly now. the first industrial plows, chemical fertilisers and herbicides did take some time to kill the landscape. it was a slow dawning. we still have those blinders on. we think, oh well, if only the story included recycling! if only women or people of colour were driving the machine! if only we could negotiate fair wages for the workers! or protect some areas of natural beauty to be conserved along the edges!
but those are all just decorations on a poisonous cake.
if this feels too bleak to listen to that’s because the story is inherently a bleak one, if you’re not the hero, and now it has been told for centuries, the hero has burned all his bridges. he will have to go for that afterlife, go reign in the heavens.
unfortunately, we’re still grasping at being the hero. maybe if we put our kids in the right schools to climb the right ladder, or if they are entrepreneurial, or marry well, they could be a ceo. they could buy some real estate. they could have servants or at least corporations do everything for them.
it’s a very big machine, with all the tiny variations on the story enacted daily, in our own heads, our bodies, between us, at home and in family, in schools and the workplace, in politics, in banks, courts and prisons, on the streets, the highways, in cities, farms, in the landscape.
when we say we are reaching tipping points, what we mean is that the scale of the extraction is such that we have run out of new empires. they are all on the verge of collapse. on a planetary scale, the story has finished extraction. this is the climax we’re seeing. it’s not much fun really. there are much better story structures. much more interesting stories that don’t leave us bleak at the end. this story is of unlimited profit, of compounding growth, but the planet, like every river, mountain, oil well, every population, is reaching its limits. one more invention of one more empire — wind-farms, or genetic modification, or ai — one more business, it won’t save us and it won’t sustain the story either. the scales are tipping.
we have a small window, though, to tell other stories. to live another story that draws from the living patterns in the earth itself. we can hear echoes of the stories across indigenous cultures, in the margins, in ancient heritages, traditional skill, oral histories, in our own bodies, our own deschooling, our own ecological underpinnings. in a vision of the human animal exquisitely interconnected in patterns of the biosphere.
we can tell a story of interconnection in every tiny interaction in our days, we can co-create it in how we live and learn and work and move, in all our exchanges. what does success look like, if it is entirely mutual, if no one loses and the system grows more resilient, diverse and connected with each reciprocal act? how would that look on an intimate scale and a grand one? if the pattern is what is life-giving, meeting the needs of the whole, holistically, what solutions are then available to us?
we are astoundingly skilled, and have run the dominance story with tremendous success, extracting to extinction, concentrating power into a tiny elite. we have unimaginable influence. and now we turn our vast creativity to express a story of the interconnectedness of all life, and see what flows from that. we can create the conditions for life to regenerate in whatever we touch, whatever we encounter in our lives, in every moment, right now. the possibilities are profound.
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