anthropocene

Our driveway is crazed with cracks. I can’t help but appreciate plants springing up through these narrow possibilities. These are native plants, many with health-enhancing properties as human food, but also exquisitely cued to the lifecycles of crawling, flying, hopping creatures reliant on them. All these lifeforms follow nature’s essential precepts of diversity, adaptability, balance, and interdependence. Although our driveway does not, it’s heartening to see how easily life takes over.

I used to wonder about the soil under the sidewalk where I trudged to school each day. What happened when graders and rollers and cement trucks imprisoned it? Did all the life in that soil perish without sunlight and oxygen? How could any living thing survive so much pressure and heat? What would happen if we paved over too much of Earth’s surface? I was a child who Worried About Things.

These plants springing from cracked pavement remind me of nature’s beautiful impulse for life. It restores my hope everywhere I find it. A handful of dry lentils taken from my cupboard, after a few days of soaking and draining, grow into cheery little sprouts I can use in salads, or feed to the chickens, or plant to grow into another generation of lentils. Seeds brought from Cyprus decades ago, shared by a friend, grow each year into giant hardy winter squash that keeps well until late winter –providing nourishing meals along with more seeds to save and share. Organic potatoes in my pantry wrinkle around tiny rosettes and from them, pale tendrils fragile with new life reach out in search of sunlight. I plant these eyes two or three times each season, from late March to late August, for fresh harvests of tender heirloom potatoes.

Life’s impulse can’t always survive what we humans are doing to this planet. As a direct result of human activity, the rate of species extinction is up to 10,000 times higher than the natural, historical rate. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows ocean heating is equivalent to between three and six 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. The UN says “climate change is out of control” and experts in Earth’s climate history are convinced this current decade of warming is more extreme than any time since the last ice age, about 125,000 years ago. It’s exhausting to think about, let alone act on, this spiraling disaster.

We need new stories that reawaken us to the lived wisdom of this planet’s First Peoples and lead us to the most ethical, scientifically grounded regenerative lifeways going forward. It helps when we recognize nature isn’t just what sprouts from cracked pavement. It isn’t confined to wild places we long to visit. We are nature, right down to the life processes of every cell. It helps when our new stories speak to our descendants. It helps when they answer our ancestors.

HOPEFUL RESOURCES

books

Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future (indie link) Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry

Active Hope (revised): How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power (indie link) Joanna Macy

Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth (indie link) by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez

The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities (indie link) Darcia Narvaez and G.A. Bradshaw

Why the World Doesn’t End, Tales of Renewal in Times of Loss Michael Meade

We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (indie link) by Dahr Jamail and Stand Rushworth

Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse Jem Bendell

Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day (indie link) Kaitlin B. Curtice

Mystical Activism: Transforming A World In Crisis (indie link) by John C. Robinson

Local Voices, Local Choices: The Tacare Approach to Community-Led Conservation (indie link) by the Jane Goodall Institute

Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (indie link) Patty Krawec

organizations

Transition Network

Deep Adaption Forum

Work That Reconnects

Black Earth Institute

I’d love to hear what books, organizations, and other resources can help us all reawaken to and bring about these new stories.

“What time is it on the clock of the world?” ~Grace Lee Boggs

I am cleaning out a closet to make more space for kids’ art supplies when I come across a length of thick rope tied at intervals with colorful string.

I recognize it instantly.

Each time I taught the final session of Peace Grows workshops, we talked about how the practice of nonviolence applies on the global scale — between ethnic groups, religions, entire countries. We reviewed the many little-known ways nonviolence has impacted, even turned around national and international problems. No matter how eager participants might have been in earlier sessions as we learned about applying active nonviolence principles in our personal lives, people said they felt hopeless when it came to national and worldwide issues. That’s when I got out this rope.

I would ask for two volunteers to stand on either side of the room, each holding one end of the rope. One side represented the emergence of the first modern humans in Africa, sometime between 280,000 to 200,000 BCE. That end of the rope had nothing tied to it until around 62,000 BCE when bow and arrow were first used. By 18,000 the beginning of clay pottery was noted. Around 10,000 BCE the Neolithic revolution began, when some hunter-gatherers took up agriculture, although it wasn’t until 4,500 BCE that people begin to use the plow. At 4,000 BCE the wheel was invented. Writing was developed around 2,600 BCE. The strings got closer and closer together, entering A.D. centuries, and ever more thickly marked by discovery, scientific progress, and war. Lots of war. The farthest end, less than a hair’s width from the invention of the printing press, represented our current era. (The exact years marked on the rope may not be current with what we now know, but the distance between these advances is likely similar.)

Of course, if we look at earth’s entire timeline, the presence of modern humans is far punier.

Dinosaurs ruled the world for 165 million years. Homo sapiens showed up 200 to 300 thousand years ago. We humans are truly, in Earth time, a newly arrived species. As Tim Urban shows, over at Wait But Why, recorded history itself is a tiny blip of our time here.

By any measure, we are still engaged in the ongoing experiment of living differently than our hunter-gatherer roots. The hunter-gatherer era made up between 90 to 99 percent of our species’ time on earth and continues among some groups today. This way of life was and is much more interdependent, typically shaped as gift economies, and centered around craft, ritual, story, and arts with intimate knowledge of the land and its beings

We lived in small bands of nomadic people until the advent of agriculture, when communities grew to hundreds or thousands of people. Only then did our relationship to place and possessions change to one of ownership, gradually cleaving people into haves and have-nots. Not coincidentally, before this massive change there’s no convincing archeological evidence that we engaged in war.

About five thousand years ago we humans developed written language, currencies, and empires.

Around four to five hundred years ago we began more forcefully shaping our lives thanks to the printing press, industry, and the passionate pursuit of science. Modern capitalism emerged in the early nineteenth century, commodifying time in ways unknown until then.

We are now in the Anthropocene, when human activities are having a massively detrimental impact on Earth’s ecosystems and climate.

Yet biologically and emotionally, we are still hunter-gatherers. We evolved to be a compassionate and collaborative species. We are still learning how to live in populous cities rather than nomadic tribes of around 60 people. Our technological advancements and our weapons have developed more quickly than our ethics around their use. We have yet to grasp just how dangerous rigid economic and political systems can be, particularly when war, crisis, and division benefit the powerful.

The rope timeline I used in nonviolence workshops put our place here in a larger planetary frame of reference. Even from that distance, it seems both astonishing that we’re here at all and obvious we need to get some perspective, but it’s hard to put this into words, especially standing in front of a class. So I read a poem instead, this one by Denise Levertov.

BEGINNERS

Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla
“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea—“

But we have only begun
To love the earth.

We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.

How could we tire of hope?
— so much is in bud.

How can desire fail?
— we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?

Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?

Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,

too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.

We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.

So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,

so much is in bud.

~ Denise Levertov