On Being Human in a Time of Climate Crisis
I’m the son of Ruth, a second-generation immigrant, high-school educated single mom who came of age during the chaos of WWII. An avid reader, life-long learner, and woman of faith, she instilled in me a passion for education and a deep concern for the welfare of the world. Thanks to her, I am a first-generation college graduate who chose to pursue an advanced education all the way through to a doctorate in anthropology. An illuminating and sometimes grueling 15-year journey from BA to Ph.D.
I’m not sure what drove my interest in anthropology across all those years. The discipline barely showed up in my college’s course catalog. Maybe it was the synergy between a troubled social life in childhood from which I sought refuge in nature and an unremitting fascination with how I and everyone else fit into it all.
The wheels really started turning when I was seventeen. That’s when I left my home in Massachusetts one summer to live in the backcountry of Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, with a crew of Student Conservation Association volunteers. Mesa Verde is the first United States National Park dedicated to protecting Native American cultural heritage — specifically, the archaeology of the ancestors of some of today’s Puebloan peoples. Our job as volunteers was, ironically—and, in retrospect, disturbingly—to build a fence line between the National Park and the adjacent Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, whose feral ponies were allegedly crossing onto Park land and consuming fragile vegetation.
Something happens to you when you’re camping out in a place replete with the remains of an ancient society. Decorated pot sherds in the soil around your feet. Eroding structures built from hand-hewn sandstone blocks wedged into alcoves in the canyon walls. Red ochre and black manganese cliff-face paintings of humanoid figures and geometric designs. You feel at once alien and intimately connected to the vestiges of a world utterly not your own.
That was when I started nurturing an unfolding intellectual and visceral fascination with deep human time and the truth of impermanence. The staggering beauty, mystery and evanescence of the lives of individuals, societies and civilizations rooted in the miracle of our planet’s biosphere. This fascination has taken me in many directions in my own life and career and forms part of the impetus behind the eight reflections I offer in this essay.
The other part of the impetus is the stark recognition I share with a growing number of others that all of us — every being on Earth, of every size, shape, color and ability, human and non-human — are living and, for many, suffering in the midst of a worsening climate crisis. Because of this I want to add my own voice to a chorus that’s beginning to rise like a cacophony of rainforest birds or a free jazz jam session and spreading out from every center and corner of the world. As the climate justice essayist Mary Annaïse Heglar put it in her recent Inverse piece:
I know I’m not alone. I’m not the only one who sees the gaps. I’m not the only one who has felt left out, alienated, silenced. I’m part of a growing community of narrative change agents. We’re getting stronger. We’re getting louder. And we have room for so many more. — Mary Annaïse Heglar
Mind you, in being able to go where I have gone and do what I have done in my half-century+ of life, in being able to write and publish the words I’ve written for this essay, I also recognize that I hold a lot of privilege and access to rights that others don’t yet have or have fought — and are still fighting — much harder than I to achieve. So, I want to call out here the great need in these desperate times for everyone to listen for the wisdom in their stories, voices, and struggle.
Finally, because I also happen to be a mindfulness teacher and believe that writing honestly about the climate crisis engenders a range of heavy emotions in both writer and readers — from grief, despair, and numbness to anger and disbelief — I want to set a mantra turning based on the wise words of Zen priest, angel Kyoto williams:
Without inner change there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters. — angel Kyoto williams
1. What does it mean to be human in a time of climate crisis?
You might think of these reflections as a meditation on something Heglar wrote in her Medium essay, “Home is Always Worth It”:
We don’t have to be pollyannish, or fatalistic. We can just be human. We can be messy, imperfect, contradictory, broken. We can recognize that “hopelessness” does not mean “helplessness.” — Mary Annaïse Heglar
As an archaeologist, someone who has spent a good chunk of his career studying the deep time of cultural and environmental change, I can say with some confidence that, borrowing from Ecclesiastes, there is really nothing new under the sun. Or to use a recurring phrase from the 2004 TV sci-fi mini-series Battlestar Galactica: “All this has happened before, and it will happen again.” Human civilizations and societies have risen and fallen as long as humans have been building them. This happened in one way or another for Mesa Verde, the Maya, Uruk, Rome, Qing Dynasty, Indus, and all the rest of them.
Here’s one take-home point: 21st century human society is not exempt from the endlessly repeating cycles of birth, growth and inevitable decay. Another is this: the fall of a civilization has never yet meant the total extinction of its people. While physical and social structures crack and crumble, while the beliefs, norms, routines, and expectations whose reality depends on these structures turn to smoke, the people, enough of them anyway, absorb the shock and then go back to the art and science of improvising their futures. For Mesa Verde’s Ancestral Puebloans, this meant leaving the region and migrating to the Rio Grande Valley in what is currently known as New Mexico. For many Maya, it meant abandoning their extravagant city states and returning (with some relief?) to the modesty of forest village life.
For Native/Indigenous peoples—and everyone’s ancestors — stories remembered and handed down across generations have supplied the music for this improvisation. What happened before and what it means for us now are key themes in humanity’s survival repertoire. But in this fast-paced century, which the acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh refers to as “the time of the Great Derangement,” mainstream society seems to have contracted long-term memory loss. To use a term coined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough, we suffer from “hubris of the present.” This hubris deludes us into believing that what we have right now is better than anything that came before, even though we can no longer recall what came before.
As we awaken from our trance in the deepening climate crisis, though, I expect our hubris of the present will become humility of the present. But until that moment arrives, for too many of us it’ll still just be business as usual. “The Niagara River,” a poem by Kay Ryan, comes to mind:
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our tables and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation…
After all, we’re only human. Distracted by the din of modern life, with its breaking news, nagging notifications, and seductive virtual realities, it can be hard to notice the waterfall’s roar. But it’s getting louder.
2. Who are we?
I hear and mindlessly use this pronoun all the time in relation to the climate crisis and proposed solutions. To wit: We must make our leaders recognize and do something about climate change. We must unite to resist the forces of exploitation, extraction, and commodification that brought us to this crisis. We need to start thinking differently about our relationship to the world. We need to form new societies and structures that are integrative and permit experimentation with and cultivation of epistemologies, ideologies and practices that are transformative and not antithetical to our survival.
But who are We anyway? I believe this question must be examined deeply and iteratively because doing so reveals so many layers of assumptions and historical stratigraphy. Is We all humanity? That seems problematic. Frequently, We only comprises people from WEIRD—Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and (ostensibly) Democratic—societies. But who does that actually include? White people? Urban Liberals? Educated people? People “in the know” — the insiders, the ones who “get it”? The believers? What about the rest of humanity? What about everyone else whose shared reactions and responses to the climate crisis will determine our collective future? I feel like there’s a tacit assumption among insiders that all these others are simply followers who will step into line or out of the way after hearing the right rhetoric or being given the right incentives. But what actually happens as they’re excluded from We? What happens when they’re kept on the margins like extras on a movie set, who, despite being called supporting artistes, are only recognized as a passive backdrop?
It troubles me when I hear persuasive arguments coming from WEIRDly persuasive minds who use “we” so uncritically. It comes across as intellectually lazy, ego/ethnocentric and paternalistic. Intellectually lazy and egocentric in the sense that it’s much easier to argue from the perspective of a “Royal We” — a fuzzy extension of one’s reasonable and well-educated self — than to face the disturbing and confusing prospect of a plurality of We’s. Ethnocentric and paternalistic because taking up the burden of solving the problem for Them practically, philosophically, metaphysically feels strangely familiar; so 19th century.
The obvious truth, however, is that these other We’s are not compliant lambs to be shepherded (or sacrificed?) or customers to be sold a bill of goods. All of us are dynamic actors whose emotions, values, beliefs, decisions, relationships, and histories are integral to trajectories of action and adaptation.
3. Who should we be/come?
We all live in a time not only of increasingly tumultuous climate, technological, and social change, but also disruption of identity formations. In the past, who I am would have been determined primarily by dominant cultural and social contexts, which would influence my level of privilege and social acceptance and how I express and approve of myself. This is still very much a thing, of course, but nowadays, who I am can also be shaped by a private journey of self-discovery and self-definition, which I then reveal to the world in exchange for the promise (too often broken) of validation and integration.
However, there is a paradox at the bottom of this phenomenon. Let’s take gender for example, which my academic discipline appropriately defines as a cultural construct — a concept whose reality is conditioned by norms of belief and behavior rather than physical attributes. Here in the US, for example, more and more people are beginning to believe in the idea of gender fluidity. We are realizing that binary gender — masculine | feminine — is a construct imposed and reinforced by repressive and oppressive sociocultural norms and structures. And, in so doing, that it might be possible, indeed healthier, for humanity to exist along a gender spectrum. So far so good.
But in accepting this, sometimes we also adopt uncritically a very non-fluid assumption: that the spectrum consists of a string of discrete anchor points, like a series of buoys between the banks of a river. The quest, then, entails discovering which one is mine, which one is meant for me and, once found, tethering myself to it. This despite the fact that, as in Kay Ryan’s Niagara River poem, we all are moving inexorably toward an existential waterfall.
I think this paradox exists for all identities — racial, ethnic, national and so on. When we believe that identity of any kind is a fixed entity — one buoy on each side of a broad river (“me/us” vs. “you/other”) or one within a set of buoys between its banks — and tie ourselves tightly to it, then we’re living in denial of a reality about our relationship to each other and to a changing world.
To shed some more light on this problem, I’ll switch metaphors. In The Little Book of Being, Diana Winston, author and Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, shares some wisdom she gathered from the venerable Buddhist teacher, Joseph Goldstein:
Imagine you are skydiving, jumping out of a plane, and you suddenly realize you don’t have a parachute. I’m sure you would be terrified. Next, imagine that you look down, and there is no ground! — Joseph Goldstein
What would that feel like? I’ve tested this thought experiment on people from time to time and, most often, it seems like they can follow me through the part about realizing you don’t have a parachute, but when it comes to the part about there being no ground, I lose them. Maybe that’s because it’s not so realistic sounding. Yet I can’t help wondering if that particular realization is simply too shocking, too horrifying to embrace.
I’m reminded of the scene in the movie Gravity, where astronauts Matt Kowalski and Ryan Stone are suspended above the Earth, attached to either end of a taught cable connected to their damaged shuttle. Matt saves Ryan’s life by detaching himself from the cable and letting go. She watches, helpless, as he floats away into the vacuum of space.
We humans tend to hate this profound and anxiety-inducing sense of groundlessness. So, we turn away from the horror of not knowing and cling to a belief in essence. This maneuver nicely circumvents the disorienting sensations that arise from perceiving groundlessness, but unfortunately it doesn’t dispel the anxiety, which lurks below the surface, pointing, jabbing at the truth.
Perhaps it’s not mere coincidence that retreats-to-essence are arising everywhere in this time of climate crisis. I’m sure it’s always been the same for human groups drifting toward the edge of their respective waterfalls. But as the poet reminds us, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to “position our tables and chairs” on the river bottom. Especially when there is no bottom. Realizing this can encourage us to hold our identities in a lighter grip, noticing their immateriality, their contingency.
And their potential. Practicing this awareness allows us to discern a larger possibility space for ourselves and for our societies. We recognize that who we are and what we can become, individually and collectively, do not need to be constrained by habit, convention, or reflex. They can be waypoints instead of anchor points, offering perspective, insight, and intersection along our shared downriver journey.
4. What good is hope?
A controversial paper by University of Cumbria Professor of Sustainability Leadership, Jem Bendell, entitled “Deep Adaptation,” makes the case that the current is too strong, that climate change-driven civilizational collapse is imminent, and that the best we can do is to prepare for it in every way possible. Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine’s “Dark Mountain Project Manifesto” delivers the same message, albeit more poetically:
It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming.—Paul Kingsnorth & Dougald Hine
If we are truly headed for this comeuppance, does it make sense to hope? What good is hope? For some, hope is a hindrance because it’s tied to fixed outcomes—things staying the same or at least staying familiar—and used, in the same way Karl Marx posited for religion, as an opiate for the masses. Referencing the story of Pandora’s box from Greek mythology, writer Derek Jensen puts it this way:
The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in [Pandora’s] box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.—Derek Jensen
I sympathize with Jensen’s view of hope. When we cling to the status quo, we are not only destined for disappointment; we also allow ourselves to be used and manipulated. If, as the French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour argues in his recent book, Down to Earth, billionaires have their fingers in the air, then the wind-shift they’re sensing is fueling a transition from the philanthropist’s fantasy that “we’re all in this together” (a rising tide lifts all boats, if you will) to “every man for himself.” So, it benefits their interests to peddle hope to the rest of us while they build, individually and collaboratively, their respective arks.
However, when I shared this line of reasoning with my wife, Lori, recently, she offered a different take on hope. Lori spent many years as an emergency veterinarian, which required her to take on some of the worst, most hopeless cases. Often she was able to help an animal — a cat hit by a car or a dog with a twisted stomach — but sometimes there was nothing she could do other than to help them die peacefully in their owners’ arms. For Lori, hope was (and still is) a constant companion, but it’s a different kind of hope—a wish, but not a genie-style wish or a false promise. Instead it’s the kind of wish you hold in your heart and that motivates your actions. It demands no fixed outcome. The kind of wish, for example, expressed in the paradox embedded in two of Mahayana Buddhism’s Bodhisattva vows:
Beings are numberless. I vow to save them all.
Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them all.
We have a choice. Rather than mainlining the opiate of hope, we can be and do hope as a compassionate wish. In spite of the prospect of imminent collapse — or indeed because of it — we enact and embody a hope we hold in our heart, against all odds: to save each other and our ailing planet and, regardless of outcome, to hold what remains in our caring embrace. This kind of hope makes me think about kanyininpa, an Australian Aboriginal Pintupi word that, maybe unsurprisingly, has no direct equivalent in English. As I understand it, kanyininpa means to hold one’s loved ones and homeland in a way that keeps them safe while, at the same time, allowing them to change.
5. Can we fix it?
Since the dawn of the human species (and well before), engineering has always played an important role in our survival and, later, in building and expanding civilizations and trade networks. Since then, software engineers have built technologies to address our every need and even incite cravings where none before existed. Industrial engineers have increased efficiencies in and scaling of production to unprecedented levels. Environmental engineers have made it possible to drain wetlands, straighten rivers, and mine mountaintops and forests. Geoengineers have designed ways to tap oil reserves and, where they’re depleted, squeeze oil out of sand and stone. Genetic engineers have altered life itself to feed inexorably growing populations and profits. Nuclear engineers have made it appallingly easy to destroy the entire planet in the name of self-defense and shareholder dividends.
None of this is new. Our ancestors played variations on these themes time and again. Just never at this dizzying scale and scope. Celebrity engineers—Elon Musk, Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs—have become demigods. We look to them and their creations to enhance our lives, maybe even make us immortal, and, along the way, to fix whatever problems we have handsomely rewarded them to create with and for the rest of us. Or, failing that, to lift us off the planet we killed. There is no room for a backward glance; every effort is dedicated to moving onward and upward.
This comforting if blinkered belief structure is abetted by the emergence of a New Optimism, which rode in on the coattails of post-WWII neoliberal globalism. In short, this philosophy, remarkable in its similarity to a debunked 19th century theory of cultural evolution, which saw all societies ascending along an arc from savagery to Euro-American-style civilization, maintains that Western capitalism-cum-technology has mightily bent the arc of human history toward global peace and prosperity for all.
How soon we forget!
With his recent article for The New Internationalist, fellow anthropologist Jason Hickel casts doubt on the New Optimists’ increasing-prosperity claim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dubiousness of their pre-1980s poverty data probably holds for datasets confirming rampant violence in prehistory as well. (Steven Pinker, who is a psychologist by training and archaeologist/historian by presumption, claims pre-capitalist human relations were dripping red in tooth and claw. Already, his cadre’s argument that there’s been less warfare following WWII is being seriously questioned.) Regardless, it comes as no surprise to me that the New Optimists’ narrative would arrive to reinforce and perpetuate the pre-climate-crisis world order. It is comforting indeed to retreat to the status quo as solid evidence for and a predictor (and retrodictor) of an increasingly prosperous and safe future for all of us. That when the going gets tough, the engineers and their startups will get going. Unfortunately, solid ground is in short supply when sea levels are rising.
To quote Ram Dass or Albert Einstein (its authorship is controversial, but I like the pairing), “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that created them.” I’m not suggesting, Luddite-like, that we eliminate engineering — that would be absurd and devastating. But I am reminded of words from another (not Latour’s) “Down to Earth,” the theme song for the 2008 Pixar movie Wall-E, whose plot revolves around a last-ditch effort by a mega-corporation to save humanity by sending us into space in deluxe interstellar cruise ships while robots clean up our mess:
Like the fish in the ocean
We felt at home in the sea
We learned to live off the good land
We learned to climb up a tree
then we got up on two legs
But we wanted to fly
And when we messed up our homeland
we set sail for the sky.
But down here on Earth there won’t be robot-nannies to clean up our climate crisis. There isn’t a messianic engineer or mega-corporation that will cure our sick planet or resurrect the old world order. And climate escapism is just one side of a cheap coin whose other face is denialism. There isn’t a cog that needs to be replaced or a set of parameters that need tweaking. The machine has grown so large that we can no longer pretend to comprehend all of its parts and their interconnections and interdependencies. Indeed, it’s not a machine at all and never was. Neither are we, nor any other beings that inhabit this planet. If we continue to peer at the world solely through an engineer’s spectacles, increasingly we will only be able to see the need for patches. And the patches will make more holes and malfunctions that will require more patches, and on and on.
Instead, I think we need to keep our feet on the ground for once. As radical and new-agey as it may sound, we need to learn to feel the Earth under our feet again as our ancestors once did — and many Native/Indigenous and other sensitive people still do. And the ones who are feeling the acute pain and beauty of the world right now should be greeted as teachers rather than dismissed as neurodivergent or culturally obsolete.
6. Got mindfulness?
Nearly all the forces of WEIRD culture and economy seem hellbent on dissuading and distracting us from knowing the groundlessness of being human in a climate crisis. Even the mindfulness movement, which promises to help us liberate ourselves from stress and self-fixation, has been corrupted by the same influences. The sales pitch goes that “changing the world” (whatever that has come to mean) can happen only through a series of individual lifestyle choices, therapy/meditation sessions, and subscription-based technology adoptions. (A vacation on a Bahamian beach wouldn’t hurt either. Wait…) We’re assured that changing the world is accomplished not by questioning the system, nor by uniting with others to disrupt it, but instead by putting on our noise-canceling headphones and listening to a soothing guided meditation while we blink out in the eye of a Category 5 hurricane.
This is of course a lie. (Hey, that’s not bliss—that’s dissociation!) But it’s a honey-coated lie and so much easier to swallow than the truth. The truth is that mindfulness was never about learning how to be an escape artist. That said, peace of mind can be a key outcome of the practice. There are many other beneficial outcomes as well. Attentional fitness is one. Another is psychoemotional healing. Two more are self-knowledge and self-transcendence. But these are not ends in themselves. They are means to finding your way to one end: Waking up and being ready for whatever meets you, be it majesty or monstrosity.
Easier said than done for four reasons. First, mindfulness meditation is, like the saying goes, simple but not easy. In other words, it’s simple because all you have to do is find an anchor for your attention — the breath, a sound, a candle flame — and practice nonjudgmentally returning to it as often as your mind wanders. It’s not easy because our minds hate to stay focused on such tedious anchors. The second reason is that it’s tough to want to wake up to a hurricane. It’s much easier to merely want to calm down, be less distracted, and learn to love yourself more. This is partly because of how mindfulness has been marketed in the West; partly because these aspirations target WEIRD societies’ core deficits; and partly because it’s less painful, over the short term anyway, to live in denial of the forecast.
The third reason is that mindfulness was never intended as an isolated individual practice, so it doesn’t work so well when it’s sold that way. Buddha had a sangha (community). As one Buddhist teacher whose name I can’t recall once said, even the hermits who meditated alone in caves for years brought their masters with them (in their minds and training). And how do you think they kept themselves fed? Local laypeople regularly brought food up to the cave, that’s how. (The same kind of myth of rugged individualism arose around Thoreau.) And, inevitably, contemplative hermits leave their caves and rejoin society.
The fourth reason is that the flavor of Western mindfulness doesn’t taste the same on everyone’s tongue. For some — white, middle-class people like me, for example — it can taste sweet (with patience and perseverance). For others, because of histories and experiences of marginalization, enslavement, and colonization to name a few, it can taste quite bitter. There’s nothing more off-putting than having the rich cuisine of your own contemplative traditions shelved in favor of a WEIRD meditation buffet.
So, yes, I believe mindfulness should be a core component of how we respond to the climate crisis. It can help us wake up to the emergency and help us cultivate the resilience, resourcefulness, and creativity we need to intervene and adapt. But to gain more relevance and efficacy, it will need to lose some of its sexy and reconnect with its roots. In Pali, an ancient Indian language in which Buddhist scriptures were first recorded, the word for mindfulness is sati, one translation for which is “memory.”
I’m no scholar of Pali or Buddhism, so I can’t locate sati in its original sociohistorical context. However, in today’s world I can’t think of a better definition of mindfulness practice than an act of remembering. Remembering that I am alive. Remembering that I am not alone. Remembering that I am not eternal. Remembering that the Earth is my home. In other words, cultivating humility of the present. After all, it shouldn’t be lost on us that the English words “humility” and “human” both contain vestiges of the ancient Proto-Indo-European word *dhghem-, which means “earth.”
This kind of mindfulness practice invites sensitivity and receptivity to a wide spectrum of ways of knowing and cultural, social, environmental and personal histories and identities. It means more mindfulness teachers and practices dedicated to helping us investigate, somatically (in the body) and cognitively (in the mind), over and over again, “What is it like to be human, right here and now?”
It also means advancing the good work and examples of wise teachers like Michelle Chatman, Anushka Fernandopulle, Rhonda Magee, Kamilah Majied, Richard Rohr and so many others. It means expanding and multiplying mindfulness circles to include teachers, practitioners and practices whose contemplative heritages may not be rooted in Westernized religious traditions. This includes Indigenous/Native teachers and their students as well as members of other underrepresented groups. To quote Mary Annaïse Heglar out of context, “we have room for so many more.”
Take for example the NdYuka people of Suriname and French Guiana. These are descendants of 18th century formerly enslaved and fugitive people of African descent who found refuge in the Amazon rainforest and established thriving communities. According to the ethnographic work of the late Dutch anthropologist Ineke van Wetering, some NdYuka traditionally belonged to a sky spirit, or Kumanti, society, membership in which required intensive meditation training. Imagine what it would be like to welcome new circles for the wisdom and practices of NdYuka Kumanti teachers and students (should they still exist). Wetering writes,
Regular meditation on the verities of Kumanti lore will lead to the coveted state of equanimity, of self-confidence, and a strong identification with certain supernatural forces. … During their long training, increased confidence and spiritual repose are expected to produce that singleness of intention that will help further beneficial aims… Of all emotions, fear is considered the great enemy. He who finds himself strangled by an anaconda can only escape when his mind does not fall prey to panic. — Ineke van Wetering
7. Where (and how) should we turn?
For people who follow such things, there has been a resurgence of interest lately in William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” He wrote it in the aftermath of World War I, when, for Europeans at least, the world as they knew it had disintegrated:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Sound familiar? Although it contains elements of both, this poem was penned neither as an ode nor a prophecy. Rather, it bore witness to emergence. For Yeats, his poem’s gyre was, similar to so many constructs belonging to other cultural worlds — from Hopi, whose origin stories feature passage from one world to the next; to Maya, whose calendar round comprises interlocking, perpetually revolving epochal wheels; to Hinduism, whose Yuga cycles represent the birth and death of eons — more like a wormhole than a blackhole. Like all the civilizations and paradigms that came before, Yeats’s Europe had simply passed (more precisely, crashed) through a dark veil into the twilight of a new world order.
But as “The Second Coming” reveals, it’s not the language of science, nor philosophy, nor history, nor even anthropology (perish the thought), that breathes life into the wasteland. It’s the language of the Sacred. Despite the eminently reasonable arguments offered by our waning era’s most brilliant (and invariably WEIRD male) Neo-Enlightenment thinkers — our Pinkers, Sam Harrises, Richard Dawkinses, Neil deGrasse Tysons — on the ground, where it really counts, it has always been and will always be the Sacred to which people turn. (Sorry guys.)
And turn, and turn. The moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, citing The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, a classic text by Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, has referred to the Sacred as a magnet around which people, like copper wires, revolve to generate “social electricity.”
But this metaphor is a bit too mechanistic for me. In the midst of a climate crisis, I think there’s an invitation now, in spite of our AI robocrush, to move beyond our infatuation with engineering. Because above and below all, we are, as Bruno Latour, the philosopher-anthropologist I mentioned earlier, likes to call us, “terrestrials.” Therefore, the Sacred is and must always be rooted in the Earth — like Yaxche, the Maya Tree of Life; or Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree; or the Bodhi Tree, the epicenter of the Buddha’s enlightenment; or the Christian Rood-Tree; or the African Baobab, an ages-old source of life and community.
In Cat’s Cradle, the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical and somewhat prescient mid-20th century story about a human-caused environmental apocalypse (his arriving by ice instead of fire), these hubs are called “wampeters,” around which a group of believers (a “karass,” if you must know) revolve “in the majestic chaos of a spiral nebula”:
The orbits of the members of a karass about their common wampeter are spiritual orbits, naturally. It is souls and not bodies that revolve. — Kurt Vonnegut
Furthermore, I’m convinced that societies which revolve, evolve, as long as their regard for the Sacred is responsive to a changing world. In this way, by circling the Sacred — be it a tree or a pond, a rock or a block, or a planet — in communal acts of reverence, celebration and, in direct opposition to our WEIRD aversion to discomfort, even sacrifice and suffering, we effect a timeless human art from whose performances arise purpose, connection, and resilience. Indeed, in a time of climate crisis, when “the centre cannot hold,” perhaps the Sacred itself re-forms in and as the center of its revolutions.
8. So what?
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief.Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowman dig my earth
None were level on the mind
Nobody up at his word
Hey, hey
In the TV series Battlestar Galactica, Bob Dylan’s tune, “All Along the Watchtower,” so subtle and haunting at first, slowly increases in volume and definition over time, ethereally filtering through the hull of the ship and into the bodies and lives of its crew. Like Yeats’s poem, it signals both demise and destiny.
If I had the chance to pick the score, though, I think I would have selected “So What” by Miles Davis instead. For a lot of reasons. To set the stage, listen to the recording of this song’s iconic 1959 performance. On a superficial level, the title of Davis’s song ironically sums up the argument I make at the outset of this essay: “All this has happened before, and it will happen again.” So, so what? But it goes much deeper than that. If there really were a melody perfusing spaceship Earth and resonating within our being, it would be wordless. And it would be jazz music: improvisational, dissonant, evergreen, collaborative.
A couple of years ago, my father-in-law, Dave, (who, as it happens, is a brilliant health systems engineer — didn’t mean to diss your profession, Dad!) was visiting my family. While we ate dinner at home, we got into a difficult conversation about the future of humanity. Instead of climate change, it revolved around the advent of AI. Based on what he had read and experienced, my father-in-law was convinced that AI was eventually going to take over the world. Once this ÜberMind realized how inefficient and unnecessary humans are, Dave argued, we would be at best completely sidelined and at worst exterminated.
No amount of rationalizing in the other direction could console him. Dave appreciated our attempts but dismissed them with sad eyes and a knowing smile. Our conversation continued for a bit after dinner and, while we picked up the dishes, he joined my teenaged musician son, who had begun practicing in the next room. Liam is a classically trained cellist, but he also arranges pop songs for cello and loop pedal and experiments with improvisation. While his grandpa listened, he started playing a piece — a pop song; I can’t remember which one it was — as the rest of us came in and sat down. When the melody got too repetitive (as popular music always does), Liam started improvising, expressing the vibe in his own way, exploring new riffs between the spaces in the song’s structure.
“Oh,” my father-in-law suddenly said, looking relieved. “I get it now.” Get what? we wondered. “I guess it all comes down to improvisation, doesn’t it.”
I’m not a musician, so I sat down recently with the acclaimed composer, Bruce Adolphe and asked him about improv. The relevance of his response extends well beyond music (as if that language had boundaries) and easily into the realm of our engagement with the climate crisis. Bruce told me that there are four key principles involved in the creative process underlying improvisation: First, newness or surprise — a fresh connection between seemingly unrelated phenomena sparks discovery and innovation; second, emotional authenticity — the music touches something real inside you; third, precision of expression — notes are not wasted, there is clarity in the musical idea; and fourth, unity — the piece coheres, all of its parts belong together.
When I listen to Miles Davis’s “So What,” I can feel a life force flowing through it. His ensemble’s playing is fresh, evocative, parsimonious and whole. What’s more, I think it contains within it the answer both to its eponymous question and perhaps to that same question as it applies to being human in a time of climate crisis. Consider how the “Life of a Song” page of the Financial Times describes Davis’s work:
It is simple, melodic and catchy, but the song’s origins are complex. They can be found in what was once revolutionary harmonic theory, in classical music and African ballet, and several sections of the song were “borrowed.”
Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun, even when it comes to a jazz composition. But that’s just the point. When you crack open the song and peer into its core, you discover memory. The answer to “So What” isn’t spontaneously generated—it emerges like a tree from its seed or a story from lived experience. Rooted in the diverse histories of its existence, it unfurls—responsively, not reactively or synthetically—into a new time, place and expression.
This kind of emergence is already happening in so many ways and places, from youth-led strikes and performative rebellions around the world; to online deep adaptation forums; to climate crisis-engaged institutions, courses, political resolutions, theatre, music, literature, and documentaries. Through these improvisations, which thrive on a spectrum between harmony and dissonance, we re-connect with each other, re-rooting ourselves in the Terrestrial. In these re-charged communities, we do what we humans have always done in the groundlessness of a crisis: re-member—enacting Sacred revolutions that hold us together while our world, once again, falls apart.
