Today in my daily ritual that begins with a cup of coffee
accompanied by the opening of a book, I was challenged by which one to open
first. Morning time is nonfiction time for me. I ultimately decided on the
newest book that was sitting away from the current reading stack.
Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner
Future by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. It caught my eye on the new book
shelf at the library last week. As per usual once the title grabs me enough to
look between the covers, I decided it was worth the trip home to see if the
writing was compelling enough to hold my interest. After reading the
introduction a couple of days ago I decided it was.
Why that book this morning? I’m not sure. I know there was
a thought that tonight I chair our recycling organization’s monthly board
meeting and that maybe something I might read in it today could spark something
in our meeting. But then, I’m also facilitating a different meeting later this
morning with a statewide peace network, so why didn’t I pick up either Samantha
Powers’ A
Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide or Cynthia Enloe’s
Twelve
Feminist Lessons of War from my pile?
I suspect, especially with the Powers book, that I can only
handle small doses of the pain of stories of genocide from the past, as we are
confronted with others who are experiencing this suffering as I write this. Too
often, if not supported by my own government, we are complicit in that suffering.
Having only read the introduction to Enloe’s book I don’t have enough of a
sense to see exactly where it will take me.
The other two titles at hand, (there is still one up in the
bedroom pile - Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the
United States, a birthday gift from Ellen) are Robin Wall-Kimmerer’s
Gathering
Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Marjorie Kelly’s
Wealth
Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive
Today’s Crises. Gathering Moss is a book I bought for Ellen
when it first came out, for she is my naturalist connection. She pulled it out
the other day and secretly added it to my pile and I at once began to savor it,
as I did Kimmerer’s indelible Braiding Sweetgrass.
I read a short chapter each morning and it is like a soothing meditation so
rich in the heart, soul, and science of this neglected life form, for which I
have some unknown affinity for.
Wealth Supremacy was a
recent gift from friends who thought I would enjoy this exploration of the
financialization of our society. They are right. Her take so far is a fresh
consideration of the demise of our cultural drivers, especially during my
lifetime. After consuming a chapter in Wasteland, I picked up Wealth Supremacy
and read a chapter that focused on the importance of the use of language in
shaping how we think about and value things - “When language is biased …when
it casts worker income as “expense” and capital income as “profit”—we enter a
symbolic order that denigrates us, marginalizes us or others, and disparages what
we wish to honor”. (p.29)
But as I finished that section, I began to wonder how do all
these different books connect? How could I weave both my journey to accumulate
and actually read them, and how on earth could I possibly describe their
collective impact on how I think or live as a result of my encounter with them?
I certainly seem driven to understand the intersection of many forces at work
in our world. Perhaps it’s why I struggled as an undergraduate, changing my
major every term from electrical engineering to journalism to psychology to
sociology to political science to philosophy only to take a hiatus for a few
years before returning to college. I finally connected and found a home in the
field of geography that by design looks at many intersections of the human
world with the natural one. It was through that discipline and those teachers
that I became aware of aware of the importance of the living world and our
interactions with it. I remember two significant papers I wrote back in 1974 –
one on the El Nino effect for a
climatology course (it was a pretty new theory at the time) and the second, a
proposal for establishing recycling program for the city of Detroit. Funny, how
50 years later those issues are much more visible.
The emerging field of sustainability builds on that awakening
that geography provided for me. And the field continues to go deeper and
broader in understanding all those many intersections. When I worked on the two
volume encyclopedia Achieving
Sustainability: Visions, Principles and Practices (2014) I was
tasked with explaining these intersections. With the help of my gifted design colleague,
Theresa Moore, I came up with this image
The concept tries to show that the economy is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of the society which is a wholly owned subsidiary of
the environment. The image also tries to convey these intersections are not
static, but dynamic. As I glance at this now, I wonder if the UN Sustainable
Development Goals had been agreed to then, if I might have substituted those 17
goals for the individual ones I listed, since most of them correspond to those
goals.
Obviously, this is a an incredibly complex system to
understand, especially since it is not static. We shape the systems in what we
do, how we engage with each other and with the natural world. Wealth supremacy
is the headline in the Washington Post and The
Guardian this morning with the release of a new Oxfam report noting the
incredible supremacy of the wealthiest impact on our climate – “TOP
1% Responsible for More Carbon Emissions
Than the Bottom 66%”.
“To take what we need to support
our profligate lives, and leave a ransacked and destabilized world for our
grandchildren, is not worthy of us as moral beings.”
(Kathleen
Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of
Climate Change. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016. p.4)
I read to try and better understand how we might learn to
live together sustainably and in peace. The Oxfam report is more evidence that
the current approach is leading us towards an abyss. Our journey towards
sustainability continues. It’s the least I can do with the time I have left. Keeping
ideas of better possibilities alive in hopes, as Milton Friedman once said:
“Only a crisis -
actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I
believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies,
to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the
politically inevitable.”