Jonathan Cloud :: Life, Examined

Jonathan Cloud

The world today is facing an unprecedented set of crises.

The most recent to burst upon public awareness is that of global warming, and it is indeed a matter of urgency and of critical importance. We have, according to the latest scientific estimates, only seven years in which to level off our greenhouse gas emissions - and then begin to reduce them sharply - if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change. This alone requires a massive transformation of our infrastructure, our economy, our energy use, our way of life, our society.

But the climate crisis is not occurring in isolation, as if it were an asteroid hurtling toward the earth. It is a consequence of many other factors: resource extraction and fossil fuel use, industrialization and massive population growth, scientific and technological immaturity, and the willful perpetuation of ignorance and superstition. It is not separable from the many other crises that we see occurring on the planet, from the growing disparity between rich and poor, the violence and conflict that afflict many parts of the world, the fear and oppression visited upon our own people as well as upon our so-called adversaries. To solve the climate problem, we will need to address some other difficult issues as well, including the demands of other nations to reach our level of economic development and their willingness to imitate us in the unlimited pollution of our environment.

The consequences of environmental degradation are not felt equally around the world; but they will eventually be felt by everyone. Here is how Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, described this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

One of the most significant aspects of the impacts of climate change, which has unfortunately not received adequate attention from scholars in the social sciences, relates to the equity implications of changes that are occurring and are likely to occur in the future. In general, the impacts of climate change on some of the poorest and the most vulnerable communities in the world could prove extremely unsettling. And, given the inadequacy of capacity, economic strength, and institutional capabilities characterizing some of these communities, they would remain extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and may, therefore, actually see a decline in their economic condition, with a loss of livelihoods and opportunities to maintain even subsistence levels of existence.

But since the IPCC does not provide policy prescriptions, it does not make recommendations as to how to avoid the looming conflicts over water, food, health, and human habitation - which will add to those already occurring over oil, access to markets and capital, and ethnic, religious, and idealogical divisions.

Moreover,

Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts on biodiversity. There is medium confidence that approximately 20%–30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5–2.5 ºC, relative to 1980–99. As global average temperature exceeds about 3.5 ºC, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40%–70% of species assessed) around the globe. These changes, if they were to occur would have serious effects on the sustainability of several ecosystems and the services they provide to human society.

Certain regions, such as the Arctic, Africa, the delta regions, and island nations, are likely to be especially affected; and the vulnerability to climate change is increased by “poverty, and unequal access to resources, food insecurity, trends in economic globalization, conflict, and incidence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS.” In addition, “migration and movement of people is a particularly critical source of potential conflict,” as I believe we are already experiencing in America.

The IPCC has concluded that

anthropogenic factors could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending on the rate and magnitude of climate change. For instance, partial loss of ice sheets on polar land could imply metres of sea level rise, major changes in coastlines, and inundation of low-lying areas, with greatest effects in river deltas and low-lying islands.

The only question is how long it will take for these conditions to materialize if we do nothing; and what is likely to occur even if we are able to mitigate our GHG emissions.

Science tells us not only that the climate system is changing, but also that further warming and sea level rise is in store even if greenhouse gases were to be stabilized today. That is a consequence of the basic physics of the system. Social factors also contribute to our future, including the ‘lock-in’ due, for example, to today’s power plants, transportation systems, and buildings, and their likely continuing emissions even as cleaner future infrastructure comes on line. So the challenge before us is not only a large one, it is also one in which every year of delay implies a commitment to greater climate change in the future.

Pachauri states somewhat abstractly that

- For a CO2-equivalent concentration at stabilization of 445–490 ppm, CO2 emissions would need to peak during the period 2000–15 and decline thereafter. We, therefore, have a short window of time to bring about a reduction in global emissions if we wish to limit temperature increase to around 2° C at equilibrium.

- Even with this ambitious level of stabilisation the global average sea level rise above pre-industrial at equilibrium from thermal expansion only would lie between 0.4–1.4 metres. This would have serious implications for several regions and locations in the world.

The mostly likely scenario is that we will not achieve this goal, and therefore average sea level will exceed several feet. For those living near the coasts (i.e., about one-third to one-half of humanity) this is not good news. We are in a race against time to prevent things from getting much worse; but we’ve already done irreversible harm to the ecosystem.

Al Gore, the co-recipient of the Peace Prize with the IPCC, puts things in even starker terms:

Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, “We must act.”

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff.” One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week, warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and methane.

Even in Nobel’s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.” After performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth’s average temperature would increase by many degrees if we doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague, Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless, and odorless – which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented – and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them. Yet as George Orwell reminds us: “Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself. Now, we and the earth’s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war planners: “Mutually assured destruction.”

More than two decades ago, scientists calculated that nuclear war could throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a “nuclear winter.” Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world’s resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of creating a permanent “carbon summer.”

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, ” Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” Either, he notes, “would suffice.”

But this does not need to happen.

But neither need be our fate. It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11^th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of extraordinary threat; thatProvidence could be trusted to do for us what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a shared resolve with what he called “Satyagraha” – or “truth force.”

In every land, the truth – once known – has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between “me” and “we,” creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of ideological conformity and a new lock-step “ism.”

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that release creativity and initiative at every level of society in multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness the sun’s energy for pennies or invent an engine that’s carbon negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”

In Gore’s view, we can rise to this challenge.

We too can find our greatest opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, “crisis” is written with two symbols, the first meaning “danger,” the second “opportunity.” By facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by the beginning of 2010 – two years sooner than presently contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon – with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe and Japan for the steps they’ve taken in recent years to meet the challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it is the two largest CO2 emitters – most of all, my own country – that will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost, without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish to redeem squandered time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do. Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.”

“Expanding the boundaries of what is possible” seems to me to require more than technological change. It is fundamentally about the way we see things. Having spent many years in the field of personal transformation, it is clear that this is a large part of what it is about: unless we can see a new possibility, a new goal that it is genuinely possible to strive for, we are not willing to make the effort to surpass ourselves, and to give up what is comfortable.

Finally, Gore concludes:

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: “We have a purpose. We are many. For this purpose we will rise, and we will act.”

But I’m not sure sure that we have, as yet, “everything we need to get started” save the political will. As Jared Diamond points out in Collapse, his extensive study of why societies fail, a lack of awareness, of widespread understanding, or the failure to make the right choices, can doom an entire civilization to very rapid extinction. Our challenge today is even greater than that, for it is not just the future of a single civilization that is at stake: it is the future of humanity, and quite possibly of that of a large percentage of the other life forms around us.

It seems to me that we must alter our species’ relationship to its environment, and to the web of life that supports us; and this means a deep change in the way most if not all of us see the world and see ourselves. While we are doing everything we can with technology, with public policy, and with business, we must still be committed to altering humanity itself, to expanding awareness and understanding, to moving forward with conscious evolution. For it seems to me that we need to be deeply cautious of undertaking massive changes in the world for the wrong reasons or without coming from the right set of goals and presuppositions.

It is arguable, for example, that our current misadventure in Iraq did not come about because of wanting to remove a dictator or to establish “democracy” in that region, but because every action emanated from, and was correlated with, the wrong motives, coupled with faulty information. If we are now to embark upon a crash course to lower our carbon footprint on the planet, we must understand this in terms of reducing our overall negative impacts, as a species, on our environment, and accepting our responsibility as “guardians of the planet.” This means, for example, that we are guardians of the Chinese region of the planet, and they of the American region. In reality, it is all one region. As Gore says, “We must begin by making the common rescue of the global environment the central organizing principle of the world community.”

But it also means more than this. Everywhere, today, there is an intensified struggle for resources, capital, freedom, and power. We must find a way to expand all of these, to share them equitably and use them intelligently, for the common good, and not just for the good of our own tribe or nation or cohort of the population.

This commitment to help and empower everyone is, as Gore suggests, a profound shift in our worldview. We don’t know where the best solutions will come from. What we do know is that we must shift the way all of us live if we are to coexist, all 7 or 9 or 12 billion of us, with the rest of life on this planet.

Here are the complete texts (and videos) of these speeches:

Dr. R. K. Pachauri’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

Al Gore’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

• Climate Change , Events , Global Warming , Reflections , Sustainability Original created December 10th, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

It seems a strange thing to say, but we no longer live in “normal” times. By “normal” I do not of course mean “idyllic”; anyone who has any understanding of history knows that humans have been at war with each other, and with a large number of other species, pretty much since we emerged on the earth. But it is only around the middle of the last century that we discovered how to annihilate ourselves, and along with such annihilation destroy much of the rest of life on the planet. Remarkably, given our history, we have so far not chosen to do so; and most of us still regard it as a miracle that we did not blow ourselves up during the era of MAD (”mutual assured destruction”).

Of course, it could still happen. There are still enough nuclear weapons scattered around the U.S. and the former Soviet Union, not to mention China, India, Pakistan, Europe, Israel, North Korea, and perhaps a few other countries to destroy the planet a dozen times over, and it would only take a rather trivial accident (like a plane crash, or a major oil spill, perhaps) to trigger a completely unanticipated and uncontrollable launching of these aging weapons of mass destruction. But at least we understand the threat, and have learned to cope with it, and have put in place some hopefully effective fail-safe mechanisms to prevent it. It requires eternal vigilance, but not by all of us, and as long as no one makes a mistake or goes haywire we can get on with the business of life, having babies, quarreling with our neighbors, making a living.

The challenge we now face on earth is every bit as devastating as the bleak prospect of “nuclear winter,” but is in some ways at the opposite end of the scale. It will occur not by deliberate or unintentional action, but rather if we do nothing at all, and just keep on living. Rather than plunging us into a frigid night, it threatens to expose us to a boiling cauldron of gases or the blazing heat of the noonday sun in Death Valley. Exposed to this, the plants and animals around us will just shrivel up and die; along the coasts, the seas will rise and engulf us; vast numbers of us will be displaced, and if not fought off will overrun the remaining temperate zones, descending like locusts and leaving nothing but barren wastelands. It will not occur all at once, but the collapse of species can be remarkably swift, in some cases leaving barely a handful of survivors and often none at all. This is the prospect of global warming, or at least of the sort of global warming that scientists now believe will almost inevitably occur if we do not, over the course of the next seven years, drastically change direction. Without any deliberate action on anyone’s part, or even any certifiable craziness (though arguably the behavior of some of our present leaders would qualify as psychotic), we will simply end up like the vanished civilizations Professor Jared Diamond describes in Collapse, such as the Mayas or the Easter Islanders.

This is no longer an academic observation. The big picture that is emerging at recent conferences is an increasingly scary one, and it is important that we acknowledge this. Author Bill McKibben says he can now hear panic in the voices of the scientists investigating the impacts of climate change. Ed Mazria, of Architecture 2030, has a series of images of the Atlantic seabord as impacted by one-, two-, and three-meter sea rises, and points out that these may become a reality much sooner than we think. The most recent IPCC report - and remember this is a committee document, which by its nature must be cautious and consensus-driven - states that we have seven years to level off our greenhouse gas emissions, and then must begin to lower them if we are going to prevent a catastrophic rise in temperature on the planet.

How catastrophic is still largely unrecognized by the majority of the population, but when people find out about it they are moved to take action. The average temperature of the earth has risen about 1° in the last 100 years, and if we do not change course it may rise by 5° this century. This may not seem like much, but the impact is dramatic. The difference between a temperate period and an ice age is only about 3°. If the earth’s average temperature continues to rise on top of our already temperate era, we will induce a climate hotter than that under which primate life has ever existed on the planet, exponentially extending the already damaging effects we are already having on the environment. And some problems cannot be solved technologically. The extinction of species, now occurring at the unimaginable rate of 200 per day, threatens the web of life itself, in a way that is completely irreversible.

If we are to survive, a great many changes will be necessary. The recent “Green Meets Green” conference and expo at Ramapo College in northern New Jersey - where both McKibben and Mazria spoke - dealt with changes in communities, in jobs, in businesses, and in government policies and legislation. And these are fundamental changes: for example, we need to measure corporate performance on more than “profit” (and indeed profit may have to take a back seat to people and planet for a while), because you can’t have a healthy company in a disintegrating ecosystem. We need to live in “zero net energy” homes, drive electric cars that are interconnected with the grid, and put a moratorium on the development of coal-burning power plants (and begin to phase them out as quickly as we can). These are changes that require fundamental shifts in our political life, our economy, and our culture.

For McKibben, this shift is toward a greater focus on community life, on farmers’ markets, on self-sufficiency, on friends, and on political activism. The two nonprofits I am currently involved in assisting are both expressions of this. Community Green is a local, grassroots, environmental action organization that focuses on education, involvement in community affairs, and practical lifestyle changes. CALL - Cooling America thru Local Leadership - aims to create a local carbon offset exchange, where the proceeds go back into the communities to foster carbon-reduction initiatives.

For Mazria, as well stopping the use of coal, it involves completely rewriting our building codes, changing our land-use patterns, and following green principles whenever we renovate - so that in 30 years from now nearly 75% of our building stock has become self-sufficient and carbon-neutral. For Jeanne Fox, head of New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities, it involves greater conservation, shifting our energy production to renewables, and smarter technologies. For many local mayors, it involves carbon inventories, citizen engagement, and eliminating solid waste. All of these are likely to be necessary - along with citizens changing their light-bulbs, ditching their SUVs, and driving 55 instead of 75 on the highways.

Essential to all this is a profound psychological shift, from our alienation from nature to our reintegration with it; from our focus on consumption, to a focus on fulfilling what are for the most part non-material desires; from a tribal or xenophobic perspective to a global and interdependent one. This shift is what interests me most these days. There is no lack of urgent things to do, from light bulbs to be changed to whole cities to be rebuilt; but no individual or even group can do all of them. What we need is a sea-change in human consciousness, so that the vast majority of activities become restorative rather than indifferent or corrosive. We must somehow turn the ship around and point it in a different direction. Only then can we return to the more mundane activities of getting and spending, having babies and tending our gardens, going out for a walk and taking pictures of sunsets.

Crossposted at enviropros.meetup.com

• Climate Change , Conferences , Events , Global Warming , Reflections , Sustainability Original created December 1st, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

What a Way to Go is the strongest statement yet of the multiple crises that are facing us as a planet and as a species today. It differs from the other major documentaries we’ve seen recently - Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour, in several important ways - both in scope and in emotional impact. For anyone concerned with the fate of America and the world, this is a must-see film. But you won’t find it in theaters. Buy, beg, borrow, or steal a copy, or see if your local environmental or peace group has a scheduled showing. And then steel yourself for something as disturbing as you have ever seen before.

What this movie is mostly about, not to put too fine a point on it, is the impending ecological suicide of our species; and the only question is whether we will just take some or all of the other living beings on the planet with us. As Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael) states at one point, imagine that we live in a tall brick apartment building, and every day we go down in the elevator and remove 200 bricks from the bottom floor in order, so we say, to build the structure higher. This is what we are doing currently. Scientists estimate that we are destroying two hundred species every day, by destroying their habitats, changing their micro-climates, poisoning their food supplies.

The movie deals with four broad and interrelated topics: the end of oil, climate change, overpopulation, and mass extinction.

Of these, the least plausible for me has always been the argument about “peak oil.” Not that there’s any dispute about the numbers. The discovery of new oil reserves reached its highest level in the 1960s, and has been steadily declining at roughly the same rate that our consumption has been steadily rising, so that we now consume 3 barrels of oil for every new barrel that is discovered. The end is clearly in sight. What makes it questionable, however, is the conclusion that with the rising cost of oil our entire modern civilization, built as it is around the use of fossil fuels, will collapse. This seems to me implausible for several reasons: first, because we will tap other sources as oil becomes more expensive; second, because other forms of fossil fuel (such as coal) remain abundant; and third, because the end of oil does not mean the end of cheap energy.

Moreover, as oil becomes more expensive we will most likely begin to reposition it for “higher” uses (plastics, mostly) where its higher cost is not as much of a deterrent, and merely shift to burning other and cheaper resources - if we do not indeed begin to wean ourselves off our fossil reserves altogether. This seems to me the one area where a “technological fix” remains possible.

But the same cannot be said so easily for climate change, overpopulation, or the demonstrably irreversible process of mass extinction. It is possible that we have already set in motion climatic changes that will create an unstoppable positive feedback loop, leading to a catastrophic failure of the world’s ecosystems no matter what we do. It is probable that we cannot stop or reverse these climatic changes before they begin to impact us severely, by changing weather patterns, sea levels, and species habitats. And it is certain that if we do not change course sufficiently, either through ignorance or greed, we will overshoot and cause a massive global ecosystem collapse - on the scale of what is still an unmentionable threat, an accidental or deliberate nuclear winter. These problems cannot be resolved by any of our current technologies.

The truly overwhelming nature of this is, moreover, borne into us by the way it is presented. The story of how we got here is told through author, director, and editor Tim Bennett’s quintessentially American life story, from growing up in the hardworking and god-fearing mid-West, to trying to fit into a regular job and develop a conventional suburban life, to awakening into this unique moment in history and realizing just how fragile, how endangered, and how oblivious it all is. What is even better, Bennett does not show us an endless series of hurricane-ravaged resort areas, or images of the earth from space - images which have long since ceased to have the emotional impact they once had - but rather a series of scenes from old movies, mostly black and white, that show earlier and often more hopeful periods of American life, along with some strikingly prescient moments of foreboding.

For trailers and other reviews of the movie, visit http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/trailers-and-reviews/. The movie site also has links and resources, a book list, and some blogs, though nothing that speaks as powerfully as the movie itself. Watch it. Your life and your work will never be the same.

(Crossposted at http://sustainablebusinessincubator.com/?p=51.)

• Climate Change , Global Warming , Movies , Reflections , Reviews , Sustainability Original created October 14th, 2007 Comments(1)

Jonathan Cloud

One of the challenges we face is just conceiving of the nature and scale of the change required to make the world a sustainable habitat for human beings. We know that our present reality is literally unsustainable, and is already beginning to show signs of critical deterioration through the effects of our industrial and post-industrial economic activity.

Scientists have reported that a record amount of Arctic sea ice melted this summer (2007). According to the UK Daily Mail, “The ice cap shrank by 386,100 square miles - an area four times as large as the UK - from the previous low in 2005.”

…”It’s the biggest drop from a previous record that we’ve ever had and it’s really quite astounding,” said Walt Meier, from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

See complete story.

Our entire way of living, our society and our economy, are about to undergo a radical change. The question is, how will we adjust to the already unavoidable consequences of climate change? And what steps will we take to prevent further global warming?

Our housing needs to change - and indeed our entire concept of community life may also change as a consequence. Our transportation needs to change. We can no longer keep building roads for fossil-fuel burning vehicles; while we can certainly switch over to electric vehicles, we have to look further at how we are generating that electric power, and whether indeed our whole aging infrastructure of highways and bridges - built originally to allow the military to move swiftly across the country to counter a Communist invasion - is really worth renwing and expanding to create more congestion and sprawl.

The question is, are we going to need to build entire communities that are little islands of cool, green, health - and eject their heat and waste into an even more degraded and overheated global environment? What are the alternative visions of the future that genuinely take into account the realities of our stratified, belligerent, and economically self-aggrandizing societies?

• Climate Change , Global Warming , Reflections , Sustainability Original created September 22nd, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

Here’s where to begin:

My head is filled with the words of other people, but the words on this page are entirely my own. My life is unique, though not always honorable or even uncommon. It is simply is unique, more or less by accident - if you believe in accidents. It did not happen to anyone else. Yet it is also in some respects universal (though what those respects are is sometimes not easy to discern). As a human being there is nothing about me that is not human, nothing that can truly be foreign to anyone; yet at times it seems to me that I literally share nothing with anyone else in the world.How far back does this go? My parents were unique, and their parents before them (though, to be honest, I know nothing about my father’s). My sister was (and remains) a unique, complex, unclassifiable character; and her children and grandchildren are strangers to me. My childhood friends, long abandoned, remain individual stories of mine, and have in reality taken on very different existences. I do not belong to a single country, or ethnic group, or profession. I have not grown up, or settled down. I have been and remain an “entrepreneur,” which is to say a sort of mountebank and intellectual adventurer who chooses to cloak his completely arbitrary preferences in the language of business.

But on the other hand everything that I am belongs not only to me but also to the world. It is one aspect of what it means to be a human being. It is a fact. Even if it is only a feeling, or a fleeting thought, or a false belief: it is a fact that humans have and are all these things, and my experience is simply a more or less representative sampling of this. Less, no doubt, but a sampling nonetheless. Each new individual reveals another layer of what it means to be human.

For the most part, everyone we meet is a hustler. If they’d already made it, they wouldn’t be where you are, since you’re only there because you haven’t made it.

In the end, no matter what we do, things will turn out.

Of course, they may turn out well or poorly. But there will be an outcome that will clearly be the result of our actions. (Some religious folks may want to dispute that, if they feel God is controlling everything anyway; but in most religions God also grants us free will, and merely manifests on earth how well we exercise that free will. So we are back to the idea that it will turn out as a result of how we act.)

If things turn out well, the planet will dial back its temperature, and we humans will reach a new equilibrium with nature. We will live in peace and harmony with each other, recognizing our differences and our past violent natures, and basking in the abundance of a limitless universe. We will learn to create energy from the sun, from the movement of the planet, and from the heat of its inner core. We will stop putting greenhouse gases into our atmosphere, stop burying our wastes in landfills, and make every community, every company, and every individual “sustainable.”

But if they do not turn out well, there may be some pretty dismal days ahead for the planet. Things will get warmer, everywhere but most noticeably the further north or south you are… the ice will melt, the seas will rise, and hundreds of millions of people will be displaced. As the seas rise, the overall land mass of the earth will shrink, and coastal residents will be forced to higher ground. The vegetation around us will change, adapting rapidly to the new environmental conditions; but life will become much more uncomfortable for all of us.

As Kenny Ausubel (founder of Bioneers) says, it’s not about saving “the” environment, it’s about whether it will continue to support us. The planet has undergone many changes before we got here, and will continue to undergo changes with or without us - in part because of what we as an increasingly numerous species are putting into the water, into the earth, and into the air.

• General Original created September 18th, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

Right now I’m working on what seems like a half-dozen “sustainability” initiatives - and finding an overwhelming amount of new information and initiatives that relate to these in some way. At times, this level of activity is almost overwhelming - there is already way more happening all over the world than any single human being can keep track of - and yet when you venture outside into any ordinary American neighborhood, you can’t yet see much of difference being made.

So although I’m already running a half-dozen web sites to support these initiatives (not to mention 30 or 40 others, for clients, political groups, my neighborhood - and for many of my other innovative ideas, some of which are necessarily “on the shelf”), it seems to me that there is still room for a way of keeping a record of some of the more interesting and useful ideas, sites, and opportunities I am finding along the way.

Here are some of the things I’m already working on:

• The Sustainable Business Incubator
• The Sustainable Resource Network
• Cooling America through Local Leadership
• Sustainability Assessments (possibly to be showcased at ConservationTechnologies.net)
• Making It in the New Green Economy (under wraps)
• Somerset Hills Business and Somerset Hills Online

Here are some interesting discoveries along the way:

Shaklee has reinvented itself as a completely green company. It is still using all the old MLM techniques, and signing up distributors to promote it both as a product company and as a business opportunity, but the pitch has some unique angles, and the company seems to be serious about being “the first certified climate neutral company in the world” (in 2002).

I don’t know if it’s kosher to link to the video that is at the heart of its current promo campaign, but I’m going to do so anyway - until someone tells me not to - and if you’re interested in getting connected to the operation I’ll refer you to someone else, until and unless we decide to use and promote these products ourselves. We’ve had such bad experiences with MLM lately, however, that even this pitch may not be enough to get us to buy into another one - even though we like the products, we find they’re costly and the business opportunity is, if not entirely illusory, so onerous and time-consuming as to be uneconomic….

http://www.mygreensuccess.com (- enter code 15725282 in the left or center boxes)

It’s the message in the video - past the segment from Oprah - that, much more than the marketing hype, is what’s interesting.

• Asides , General , Projects , Reflections , Sustainability Original created September 7th, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

This period will clearly be seen as one of the darkest in American history - if indeed there’s a future in which America’s history continues to matter.

Let’s consider why this is so, and what could lead to things getting better or worse - or both - in the post-Bush era.

George W. Bush was never cut out to be president. He was an ex-alcoholic, born again, C student - who just happened to be born into a family of wheeler-dealers and politicians with some highly dubious foreign connections. The fact that he got as close as he did during the 2000 election is a testament to how poor a campaign the Democrats and Al Gore ran, which was very poor indeed. He was then anointed by a Supreme Court the majority of whose members were from the Reagan and Bush Sr. eras, in a decision which the minority derided at the time as one of the worst the Supreme Court has ever made.

Still, no one knew much about “W” at the time, except that he liked to take a lot of vacations, and was busy rewarding his cronies with plum spots in the government. It seemed that he intended to keep a hands-off approach to all issues equally, except where it came to splitting fundamentalist doctrinal hairs, as in the matter of stem-cell research.

But the shocking and tragic events of 9/11 forced him into action, and predominantly into taking the wrong actions, and mainly for the wrong reasons. As the days wore on, after 9/11, it became clear that these would have bad consequences; it just wasn’t clear how bad. He vowed to go after “the people who attacked us,” and told the country to go back to the mall. He sent the army into Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban - which had previously been armed and supported by the U.S. during the Soviet occupation - but failed to get Bin Laden. This failure emboldened disgruntled Muslim men everywhere to join this “movement” and plan and carry out acts of spectacular violence aimed at disrupting the global hegemony of the West.

While Americans were out shopping, Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld plotted to invade Iraq - which had nothing to do with 9/11 but did not view it as a tragedy compared to what ten years of bombing and blockading by the U.S. had done to their country. Some estimates have suggested that an additional 500,000 Iraqi children died during that decade, from malnutrition and lack of adequate health care. The real reasons for invading Iraq are still a matter of conjecture, given that Saddam posed no real threat to the America or West, and that Cheney had earlier warned that going into Baghdad would lead the U.S. into a quagmire. But evidently the stakes were high enough to risk even that, and the equally great likelihood of creating more “terrorists” by reacting in exactly the way they intended.

At home, the Bush regime promoted fear, secrecy, and systematic disinformation - some of which they openly described as “creating our own reality” - and whipped the country into a state of hysteria, a pale shadow of the universal dread that accompanied the Cold War, but nonetheless powerful enough to allow them to abrogate the Constitution, hold people in indefinite detention, and torture people.

More to come…

• Asides , Reflections Original created August 31st, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

The 11th Hour is clearly a movie that needed to be made - and needs to be widely seen - and Leonardo DiCaprio has done a creditable job in lending his talents and star presence to the effort. Yet in some ways, and perhaps not least in the marketing of it, it still pulls its punches; and leaves the audience reassured that we have the time, the will, and the know-how to make the change. The reality is that we probably have less time and political will than we think, and we certainly have not figured out yet all of the solutions.

DiCaprio also missed an opportunity to tell a dramatic, personal story - the way Laurie David did about Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth - relying instead on the purely didactic elements, dramatic music, and some spectacular footage, to get the adrenalin pumping, leading some reviewers to write it off as a lecture and weakening its long-term emotional resonance.

But DiCaprio makes the first and most fundamental case, that we need profound change, and on many levels. First, we need to realize that we are all in this together, and that if we do nothing to alter the global economic system we will most likely become extinct along with the thousands of species we are already extinguishing. This case needs to be stated again and again until humans are mobilized to action, for nothing else will be sufficient to ensure our collective survival.

Considering that we Americans are responsible for much of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing (or at any rate exacerbating) global warming, it is important that we hear the message and take action here - as the Europeans and even the Chinese have already started to do, to a much greater extent than our own current Administration.

DiCaprio has assembled an enormous number of experts from a variety of fields. Consider the following list, all of whom not only appear in the movie but are also profiled on the movie’s two web sites, http://11thhourfilm.com and http://11thhouraction.com:

Ideas & Experts

Air Pollution
* Tim Carmichael

Civil Society and Collapse of Civilization
* Joseph Tainter
* Nathan Gardels
* Oren Lyons

Climate Change
* Andy Revkin
* Bill McKibben
* Peter DeMenocal
* Sheila Watt-Cloutier
* Stephen Schneider

Consumerism and Media
* Betsy Taylor
* Jerry Mander

Economy and Corporations
* Herman Daly
* Leo Gerard
* Lester Brown
* Michel Gelobter
* Pierre Andre Senizergues
* Ray Anderson
* Tom Linzey

Environment and Ecoliteracy
* David Orr
* David Suzuki
* Homero Aridjis
* Kenny Ausubel
* Mikhail Gorbachev
* Paul Hawken
* Stephen Hawking

Environmental Justice
* Bill Gallegos
* Omar Freilla

Forests and Land
* Andy Lipkis
* Gloria Flora
* Jerry Franklin
* Tzeporah Berman
* U’wa Tribal Leader Berito Kuwaru’wa
* Wangari Maathai
* Wes Jackson

Fresh Water
* Brock Dolman
* Sandra Postel

Human Health
* Dr. Andrew Weil
* Theo Colborn

Human Thinking / Human Capacity
* Byron Katie
* Carolyn Raffenberger
* James Hillman
* Jeremy Narby
* Paolo Soleri
* Wade Davis

Individual Action
* Andy Lipkis
* Diane Wilson
* Matthew Petersen
* Nancy Jack Todd
* Tezozomoc

Oceans
* Diane Wilson
* Jeremy Jackson
* Sylvia Earle
* Wallace J. Nichols

Oil
* Matthew Simmons
* Richard Heinberg
* Thom Hartmann

Religious Perspectives
* Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf
* Rabbi Michael Lerner
* Rev. James Parks Morton
* Steve McAusland

Renewable Energy
* Greg Watson
* James Woolsey
* Steven Strong
* Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

Solutions from Nature
* Janine Benyus
* John Todd
* Paul Stamets

Species and Biodiversity
* Peter Warshall
* Stuart Pimm

Sustainable Desig
* Bruce Mau
* Rick Fedrizzi
* William McDonough

DiCaprio himself gives an effortlessly outstanding and yet low-key performance. Squinting as though into a blinding sun, he states what is both obvious and yet largely disregarded in the mainstream media: that the evidence is now clear, and yet our political leaders continue to disregard it; that the problem is us - too many of us, doing too many of the wrong things - and that the solution is also us, both individually and collectively, by taking action to achieve greater harmony with nature, or at the very least to merely avoid utter environmental catastrophe.

What is not clearly enough stated is what is most likely to occur under even the most rosy scenario. There will be significant global climatic changes; they are already occurring, and they will expand within our own lifetime. While we could apply technologies that would reduce our footprint by 90% on the planet, we are not likely to. What is most likely to occur is something better than we have now, but still falling far short of what is truly needed - leaving millions to die and millions more to be displaced as refugees, and the planet struggling for hundreds if not thousands of years to regain its equilibrium.

As James Lovelock, author of The Gaia Hypothesis - that the Earth behaves as a singular living organism - has recently stated:

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 per cent of the Earth’s surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This “global dimming” is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable. (http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article338830.ece)

“Her condition will worsen to a state like a coma”: to avoid this will take concerted human action on an almost unimaginable scale - much the same scale as the action we have taken to build cities, and superhighways, and power plants, and vast mining and drilling operations. If we are now to make these sustainable, we must “do them over” in really remarkable ways. If we are to imitate nature, as Janine Benyus describes in her book Biomimicry, we must

“seek sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that models a prairie, businesses that run like redwood forests).” (http://11thhouraction.com/node/86)

It’s not clear that any significant number of us even understand this, let alone know how to implement it, or will have the will to do so before a very large proportion of the human race and the entirety of many other species have been extinguished. This will be a world that is not only not the one we aspire to but is indeed greatly diminished. This is the most likely outcome, and this may be the one we need to keep in front of us in order to maintain our sense of urgency, of complexity, and of scale.

My concern with the movie is that even though it sees itself as (and in many ways is) a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, it will not get seen widely enough to have the kind of impact that Al Gore had. From New Jersey, we had to drive in to Manhattan to see it - albeit sporting our new “Drive 55″ bumper sticker - and it seems to be playing in no more than a dozen theaters around the country. I doubt if there were 30 people in the audience, though admittedly this was the late afternoon showing, and no doubt more showed up in the evening. But if this is being treated as an “art-house film” (as suggested by the FWD:Labs Collaborative) it will never get the audience it needs or deserves. We need to create a movement to get people to see this film, because it’s the next step in awakening people to the need for global action, and beginning to ask more meaningful questions about when, how, and to what extent we need to act in order to survive.

(Cross-posted at http://SustainableBusinessIncubator.com)

• Climate Change , General , Global Warming , Movies , Reflections , Reviews , Sustainability Original created August 23rd, 2007 Comments(1)

Jonathan Cloud

Supposedly, everything happens for a reason. It may not be a very good reason, but whatever happens someone will come up with an explanation that’s convenient, comforting, or otherwise self-serving. Take 9/11 for example. For Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, this was god punishing America for tolerating gays, pagans, lesbians, abortionists, and the ACLU. For George Bush and Dick Cheney, this was because “they” “hated our freedoms.” For others with perhaps a little more historical knowledge, it was because we were occupying their countries, propping up their despotic rulers, and exploiting their natural resources (not to mention overthrowing their democracies and trying to subvert their cultures).

But in a larger sense there’s really no explanation for what’s happening on the surface of this planet. At the highest level, we really don’t know how the universe was created (or “came into existence”), or what happened before the “Big Bang” (which is what I called it the first time I got laid), or how life came about. We don’t know how come we alone of the animate creatures of the earth appear to have a reflexive consciousness, and can wonder what we’re doing here.

This becomes an especially acute problem when you realize that, at the rate things are going, we may not last very long as a species. We crawled out of the mud, and entered the Stone Age, and developed agriculture and writing and complex social organizations. We acquired history, and technology, and ever-widening scientific understandings. But we also discovered a dark abyss in the human soul, and started wars, and spread disease, and learned the meanings of hunger and poverty and ethnic hatred.

At this point we are also beginning to realize that our sheer growth in numbers, in economic development, and in aspirations has begun to impact the planet, and may have already started spiraling climate change that we may not be able to reverse without very difficult changes in our lifestyles, our priorities, and our cultures. In this context the question of what we are doing here takes on a new level of importance - at least for some of us.

Now for some people this might seem to be a largely unanswerable question, a matter for speculative philosophy, or for that vast uncharted ocean of theology, metaphysics, and spirituality that opens up for us during the course of life, or for some arbitrary dogmatic religious explanation. But in reality each of us has to have a working answer, at least for immediate personal purposes even if we don’t pretend the mystery of the whole. And this whole is to some extent given by the totality of our individual realities, and is indeed partly if not wholly made up by the coexistence of the multiplicity of our answers. Whether we are Muslim, or Christian, or Jewish or atheist, we are in the end forced to acknowledge that we live in world in which each of these faiths (and non-faiths) exists and is found plausible by some fraction of humanity.

So what are we doing here?

This is the fundamental question that lies at the heart of what I call “the human project.” In my view this is a kind of metadiscipline, an inquiry, a scientific exploration of what it means to be human and to be living on this planet. What are we evolved from, and more importantly what are we meant to evolve into?

Now I know for a lot of people even this way of putting the question will raise a great many objections. Who says we are still evolving, at least biologically; and who says we are “meant” to do anything? And how is it possible that there are still individuals who deny evolution altogether? But for the moment I really don’t want to argue about this. I just want to recognize that we do, at some level, consider ourselves (at least sometimes) to have a mission in life, and if we have a mission in life then life has missions in it, and in some sense has a higher-level mission which is the sum total of those, and that we might call “human striving.” Like other organisms, humans have a will to survive; unlike other organisms, they have a desire to go beyond this level of mere survival, and create something of meaning or beauty or significance for others’ lives.

Of course, we also realize that not everyone recognizes their mission - and in that sense perhaps do not really have one, or has multiple ones, and is merely “existing”: fully conscious of their day-to-day strivings and realities, but at a higher level merely drifting or flitting through life, entirely dominated by the forces of history and social circumstance. These people are like the crowd of extras in a movie; their existence is a reality that needs to be acknowledged but they’re not really part of the action - which is invariably some particular human story. But even if many people do not accept that they have a mission, their liefe’s path is nonetheless driven by some desires and needs that are unavoidable as long as they’re breathing.

One way of looking at this, in fact, is through Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” starting with the basic ones such as food and shelter, and ultimately culminating in self-realization or self-actualization, which is a desire to fulfill our unique potential and manifest ourselves in the world. From Maslow’s perspective, self-actualization is our true mission, and for each person this is going to be unique in some respects and universal in others.

Like trees in the forest, each one of us is wholly unique and exists as an individual; but no matter what our beliefs or ethnic identity we share a certain unversal quality like “treeness,” an essential humanity that makes all alike and all related. So George W. Bush is like and related to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden; the Pope is just another dressed up gangsta rapper; and you and I and everyone else is related to each other.

There is nothing that happens to one of us that might not happen to another, and nothing that is human that is truly foreign or alien to our natures - however much we might find it in that moment abhorrent. We have to face it, to acknowledge it, to accept it as part of who we are, the light and the dark, driven by the inherent force of life and, at least sometimes, by the equally powerful urge to self-destruction. Even the aliens in Star Trek are simply reflections of aspects of ourselves.

It also helps to keep reminding ourselves that our lives are temporary, transitory as they used to say, and that none of us are getting out of this one alive. What I write may endure - or more precisely the fact that I have written it endures - but I will not, and neither will you. We better make the most of it while we’re here.

In Life Directions (one of the Harv Eker courses), I identified my mission as that of “bringingenergy, light, and abundance to the world.” This may seem a trifle grandiose, but the fact is that I have worked my entire adult career in the fields of renewable energy, human enlightenment, and abundance thinking. So this really just defines my actual activity, and describes my outlook on life. Could it be otherwise? Of course. We either choose to embrace what we recognize as our mission, or we reject it or jut disregard it or get distracted. But in the end it is our mission - if we think it is - and it is part of what defines who we are.

This seems so evident to me that I assume other recognize it also. But of course most other people are not like me. At time, for example, I am not only totally hedonistic but also completely twisted; and I given myself permission to explore every impulse as long as it is not harmful to others….

Addendum: After letting this settle in my mind, and taking a short excursion into the realms of higher consciousness, it occurred to me that perhaps the alchemists were on to something. In slightly crude terms, we could say today that the mission of the human race was to turn shit into gold - to take our dark side and transmute it into light. This seems to me to be one of the few defensible positions one might take.

Another way of saying this is that humanity’s task is to rise above its savage,  tribal, primitive ancestry and “become as gods”: taking the reins of creation into our hands (as we have already acquired the means of destroying our world), and taking responsibility for all of our actions. We are part of the self-actualization of life, on a journey from darkness and unconsciousness into the fullness of self-awareness, our conscious recognition of ourselves as both the One and the many, and of the extraordinarily elegant design of reality.

I suspect it is this, in part, that has led humans to posit a God who is like us, “in whose image” we ourselves are created and endowed with life; but after discovering the vastness of the universe, the idea of a personal God seems as paltry a myth as Zeus or Thor. Whatever exists as the “Creative Force” of the universe is not a moralistic, vengeful, demanding God, or even a more benevolent but still judgmental Being; “It” is rather the energy that surges through our veins, the sap that rises in the tree, the glory of sunset and sunrise and hope and compassion and inspiration that flows through all of us, and through the miraculous balance of this small blue planet.

It is, in other words, that transformative, transcendent vision that always and forever calls to us, and that challenges us to “be all that we can be.” This includes, I venture to say today, that we be wealthy, and happy, and successful in every way; that we return to the earth as much or more than we take from it; and that we seek to expand our awareness further each day.

• Reflections Original created June 9th, 2007 Comments(0)

Jonathan Cloud

Art is always a product of its time, and speaks back to it in certain ways. It is one expression of who we are, as generations and peoples and eras. So what does art say to us today? Is it a critique, a distraction, or simply a mirror? Is it an escape, or a doorway into our soul? Does it address the big picture, or just some minor detail?

An equally important question, for young artists, is what does art need to say to us today? If art aims to help us to see ourselves, it must see us as we are. Just to speak for my own generation: who are we as Americans, as baby boomers, as the dominant cohort of the early 21st century? Some of us are, to be sure, the proverbial aging hippies - middle-aged peaceniks, liberals, progressives, well-educated intellectuals who wish to see all cultures flourish. But a majority of our fellow citizens, after all, endorsed Bush over Kerry in 2004, and legitimized a more belligerent, incompetent, and ultimately corrupt government that continues to do harm both to America and to the rest of the world.

This Administration has committed war crimes and crimes against all of humanity; it has violated the rights of Americans and virtually suspended the Constitution; and it has seriously weakened almost every arm of the federal government, from FEMA to the Justice Department, from the EPA to the CIA.

So what should art be saying?

There is no doubt, in my mind, that it should speak to us about global warming. About Iraq. About Darfur. About Katrina. And… about whatever we are busily avoiding about ourselves.

The same is true for literature, and for blogs. This doesn’t mean that we can’t amuse ourselves, from time to time; or speak of positive things; or entertain ourselves with movies, music, or sex. But all this should be within the larger context, which is that we do not know yet how this phase of the human experiment is going to turn out. Are we the generation that turned the corner, and started to leave our history of bloodshed and cruelty and human suffering behind? Our did we contribute to taking humanity further down the long march to species extinction, to global self-destruction?

• Reflections Original created April 29th, 2007 Comments(0)