Loving being human, despite a fracturing world

Last week in London I began my talk about Breaking Together by asking the people gathered to raise their hand if they felt proud of being human. Only a couple of people did. I then asked for a show of hands on the question on whether humans are inherently destructive to nature. A small majority supported that idea. I asked these questions to get to the heart of the issue of how environmentally-conscious people understand our situation. Because I know how sadness, anxiety and frustration pulse through us in regular waves. I wanted to explore how we can love ourselves and each other, fully, despite the destruction that has been caused by modern societies – and how that can guide our future action as situations become more difficult. 

I shared some lines from Chapter 9 of my book, where I use the latest archeology and anthropology to debunk some of the assumptions that help people to conclude that humanity is inherently bad for nature, and that ecocide was in some way a ‘choiceless’ destiny for homo sapiens. The chapter is now available as a free audio on soundcloud. In it I explain some of the following insights. 

• The evidence that not all past civilisations destroyed themselves through overusing their natural resources, reminds us that our current ecological overshoot is not the destiny of any complex society, but the result of particular decisions and systems that have led up to our current world order. 
• The evidence that past ecological damage was not always the result of human activity and that some complex societies actually increased biodiversity over millennia, reminds us that humans are not inherently bad for the environment. Instead, the biological annihilation of recent decades is the result of particular decisions and systems of modern societies. 
• The evidence that not all species over consume an influx of a non-renewable resource to then experience a population collapse (debunking the algae-pond metaphor for civilisational collapse) reminds us that there was nothing predetermined in nature about humanity’s overshoot. Instead, a future catastrophic decline in human population due to the depletion of resources and destruction of our biosphere, would be the result of particular decisions and systems of modern societies. 
• The evidence that humans at far ends of the globe all utilised fossil fuels for thousands of years before burning them at ever faster and damaging rates, reminds us that over-consumption is not a natural state, but one resulting from the coercions and manipulations of people by the systems developed within industrial consumer societies.. 
• The insight that technological adoption was not a destined (choiceless) phenomenon but the result of an imperial form of power relationship (i.e. debunking the ‘parable of the tribes’), reminds us that humans have choices about our relationships with technological possibilities and with each other. 

In Chapter 10 I explain how an expansionist monetary system enshrined patterns of thought and behaviour that drove the level of destruction produced by industrial consumer societies. Humanity was not pre-destined to screw up so badly. And not all of humanity screwed up so badly. As we seek to learn and change as a result of such insights, we should neither seek to avoid – nor get hung up on – shame or blame. Instead, we can inquire into reality no matter how painful that might be for some of us. Because any explanations which might curtail curiosity into the causes of our predicament (due to aversion to difficult emotions) could limit the scope of our potential kindness to others and to wider life at this time of awakening to the full extent of destruction.

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The Kintsugi Buddha is an image from the Kintsugi World art project which accompanies the book.

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