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)
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