Jonathan Cloud::Life, Examined

Jonathan Cloud August 23rd, 2007

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
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Jonathan Cloud June 9th, 2007

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.

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Jonathan Cloud April 29th, 2007

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?

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Jonathan Cloud December 4th, 2006

All of us live in many different worlds, some of which intersect or overlap with the worlds of others. Over time, we gravitate toward those situations (realities, experiential contexts) that most appeal to us, and try to avoid those we find distasteful or dangerous.

My goal in these pages is to create a mental map of my worlds, in a form that is both creative and functionally useful, as well as providing a record of my experience and my thinking. It is also designed to allow for the assignment of priority rankings, categories, and commentaries. Read more…

There’s also the question of where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what we have experienced. In 1985 I received a UN Environment Award for work in the community (at that time Ottawa) promoting renewable energy and conservation. I don’t remember thinking it was much of a big deal at the time, and maybe it wasn’t; but I’ve held onto it since then, and here’s a scan of it:

I was 40 years old, and had been working on environmental issues for more than ten years at the time.

• Personal History , Projects , Reflections
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Jonathan Cloud December 31st, 1969

In 1969, I was just arriving at York University in Toronto from almost seven years spent in New Zealand, where I had just completed my first degree with honors. My views on the Vietnam War had, like many in our generation, changed to one of total opposition. It was clear to me that my native country was on the wrong side, and that things could only go badly, whether we were “winning” or “losing.”

At York I also participated in a student-led restructuring of the graduate program, introducing a self-directed, multidisciplinary option. I studied sociology, philosophy, history, science, popular culture; all to try to understand how we got here and where we were headed. A lot of time we were involved in intense debates about politics, sex, drugs, music, spitiruality, the New Age, the nature of our transformation.

In 1971, having completed all but the dissertation for my Ph.D., I accepted a position with the Opportunities for Youth Program in Ottawa.

This now all seems like ancient history, a time before our great dissolution, a time of idealism, of analysis, of passion, and of possibility. In 1991 I moved back to the U.S., in search of yet another new life. I worked hard through the 90s, with some successes and some failures, but without a sense of great accomplishment. By 2000 it was clear to me that the new millennium was not the arrival of utopia, but I did not expect it to become so completely disastrous.

Since the events of September 2001 the political climate in the U.S. has become an increasingly dismal one. The overwhelming sense of human tragedy, worldwide sympathy, and a search for new meaning, has given way to increasing misgivings about the suppression of democracy at home, the misdirected and incompetent aggression abroad, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of a world at war with itself.

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