Untangling the Grip of Multi Earth Tentacles on Us

For much of my life, my consciousness remained too undeveloped to have dissented from Multi Earth living anywhere near the degree that I now believe to be necessary. Getting my ecological footprint from 3.7 planets to 1.0, I now understand, means more than daily dissent from Multi Earth living. It requires that I learn to live as a One Earther, and to do so in movement-building ways with others. Writing here helps me untangle the grip of this Multi Earth worldview that increases the danger of how we humans live. Why, given my greatly increased awareness, and an earnest desire to live at 1.0, have I not been able to shake loose from the tentacles with which Multi Earth-ism grip me? And why, all around our spinning globe, does Multi Earth-ism attract so many into loving money and desiring more?

Deceivingly elusive questions that have carried me into writing a book about them. Others are helping me with final edits. Our One Earth Team is looking for publishers for bound copy or ebook versions, or both. Sending a query letter to publishers is underway. Final titles are being pondered. You can influence this process by leaving your comments here. Weigh in on Multi Earth and One Earth living as you see them.

The Casino: Living on 1 Planet while Gambling as if We're on 5

Think of this! If all seven billion people on Earth lived according to the average American, five planets would be required. Go ahead! Check it out! Go to the Global Footprint Network website and use their calculator. Of the many footprint calculators on the web, the Global Footprint Network sets the standard.

The network tells us that in order for all of Earth’s people to achieve the standards of European societies, as many as four planets are required. Or if you lump our species all together globally, from richest to poorest, then we demand 1.4 times from nature what she annually regenerates. This means that by early fall of recent years we began using resources beyond what Earth’s ecosystems produced in that year. I was shocked to learn of a study published in 2011 in the Marine Ecology Progress Series that determined we will need 27 planets by 2050 if we cannot greatly improve on what our living practices were in 2011. My mind stumbles before these impacts on Earth’s ecosystems from human population, overconsumption, and inefficient resource use. Our species, so capable of enormous good, continues to play in a high stakes casino game headed for self-destruction.

Starting Point: Let's Calculate Our Ecological Footprints

No matter which ecological footprint calculator I use, the results come out the same: I use more of Earth’s ecosystems annually than what they generate. My lifestyle is too big for our one planet. So, I use more than my share, depriving others of theirs. I take advantage of the economic and political systems that privilege me over other people. But not only people, I also endanger the habitats of animals and plants. The Earth Day Network footprint calculator tells me I’m requiring 3.7 planets. Ouch! A similar calculator at the Center for Sustainable Economics doesn’t soothe me either. Its criteria calculate me at 3.59 Earths. Their website explains how science continually updates the metrics by which footprints are calculated to assure the greatest accuracy possible.

How can my footprint be so large? I’m trying so hard to reduce, reuse, recycle, and rethink. A recent decision that my spouse, Juanita, and I made is just one example. When we faced $1000 or more of repairs to our 1998 Honda Civic, we opted for a previously owned 2004 Toyota Prius, upping our miles per gallon from 34 to 50. But there’s no getting around those footprint calculations. When I look at myself in their mirror, who do I see? I see a Multi Earther, a conqueror of Eden.

Deep within me lives the unshakeable conviction that Earth generates abundance for all life on the planet, not just for me, and not just for my family or my country — not even just for humans, but for all animals and plants. A share of that abundance belongs to each of us. It’s that share that I want to learn about and live with. Not 3.7 of the shares. How I’ve come to this point, and my quest to change, is what this blog is about.

Austerity?! Let's Talk about Abundance for All

By now we see that all the talk about austerity in these economic hard times does not apply to the wealthiest whose wealth has increased as their taxes remain low  It does not apply to military spending or the budgets of the intelligence community.  It does not apply to the bankers in the too-big-to-fail banks. It does apply to those with no jobs, low-paying jobs, and insecure jobs. It does apply to students in state universities, to people without health insurance, and to many who can no longer self-identify as middle class.

If truth were the reigning norm instead of ideology, the word “austerity” could come from the lips of our president, Congress, financial and corporate leaders only with embarrassment. More significantly, the word is an insult to Creation who continues to offer abundance intended for all. If the ones talking about austerity would use an economic model of sustainability instead of unlimited growth, Creation’s abundance would be finding its way to the tables of families. Energy would be low-carbon or no-carbon, decentralized in its distribution, and increasing quality of life in countless places.

Consider the following paragraphs on abundance from my upcoming book on “The Eden We Can Choose: Moving to a One-Earth Economy and the Stories That Get Us There” —at least that’s the working title.

Abundance

In a culture where more is better, where more means progress, where more grows the  economy, “Enough!” is heard by many as quitting or as agreeing to be marginalized.  The business and organization proverb, “If you aren’t growing, you’re dying,” goes even further by regarding “Enough!” as economic suicide.  But in a one-Earth economy, “Enough!” is the strong word that reveals the very order of Creation.  It defines the limits in which all of life can thrive, or, if ignored, decline and die.  Creation’s order includes limits such as gravity, distance, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and high-velocity wind storms.  These are unforgiving and yet vitally beneficial to Earth’s gifts of rich, livable habitat.  

In a multi-Earth economy, “More!” is the goal to which imaginations and most daily efforts bend.  Limits?  Regulations?  These are to be circumvented or undone.  “Enough” cannot be defined in a model of economics that serves empires. But in an economic model that serves all Earth’s life, “Enough!” stirs our generative and creative powers in a model of abundance that has the astonishing capacity to cooperatively distribute the resources of the planet for all her life forms.

Much as we humans can rebel against imposed limits, real limits give us precisely the structures in which we can live freely, justly, and interdependently.  It is the real limits inherent in nature that give us the structures within which to work.  They are not government regulations, state control, or institutional policies.  Nor are they corporation contracts for resources and labor that give greater priority to wealth accumulation than to a better life for all.  They are the order of Creation, what makes Creation work.  They are evolutionarily exciting, and gift us with the stability that sustains life.  Creation’s order is revelatory, informing us of limits that are recognized by commonsense.

The after-Egypt manna gatherers in the wilderness learned to imitate nature’s life-giving limits.  They learned to use self-restraint by gathering only enough for each day, literally, daily bread.  Any more would rot.  And if they practiced greed instead of repeated actions of self-restraint, they would rot the entire sharing economy. That’s what the multi-Earths global economy has done.  Instead, the daily achievement of the manna-gatherers was not only sufficiency for their household, but to assure the common good—two high ideals in their post-imperial consciousness.

All of the learnings involved in the manna story, all of its power to help us go feral, nonetheless, do not, guarantee that we will not again be attracted to the civilization story requiring multi-Earths.  Our choice to live a one-Earth story is made again and again, each day.  Each choice deepens our conversion from the scarcity worldview of empire to an abundance-with-limits worldview.

Only in a one-Earth economy where abundance is real and has limits—both!—can we experience the feeling of an abundance that is sufficient, sharing, and loving.  Multi-Earths economies have created a legacy of capturing a lot of Creation’s generosity, but with limited consciousness or structures for sharing.  One-Earth economies, by learning from nature how she does it, have created a legacy of claiming as much of Creation’s generosity as is needed, and also growing the consciousness and structures for sharing.  It is the recognition by one-Earth, jubilee economies that nature is a wise teacher, a revealer of how to live, that makes one-Earth living so well-adapted for Earth’s style of abundance.

Putting Ourselves in the Geological Epochs

Here is another excerpt from an early chapter of an upcoming book on an economy that fits our one planet, Earth.

The revelatory aspect of the ecological age finds expression in the ecological archetype which finds its most effective expression in the great story of the universe.

—Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, p. 34

What time is it in Earth’s story? Thinking in terms of geological epochs, we currently live in the Holocene epoch, a subcategory of the Pleistocene Era. The Holocene dates from 12,000 years ago, or 10,000 BCE. That is when the last epoch of glaciation across the northern hemisphere receded and temperatures began to moderate globally. All of what we call the “history of civilization” has happened within this Holocene period (Wikipedia) —a period of relative climate stability. The story of homo sapiens goes back well before civilization to 200,000 years ago. That puts the emergence of our homo sapiens ancestors in the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch which measures back to 1.8 million years ago.

The appearance of civilization, so recent in the human story, begs the question of how our ancestors embraced or resisted the big changes that evolved with the emergence of the civilization project. Because saying “yes” or “no” to what the process of civilization calls progress continues today, we can project ourselves into those same debates of our ancestors 12,000 years ago.

As temperatures moderated in the Holocene epoch, changes began to accelerate and the debates inevitably followed. What was good about the changes? What was not? Was a more sedentary lifestyle really better than a migratory or nomadic one? Not for many whose migratory patterns became blocked by settlements. Settling in a location became more and more possible as humans learned to select seeds and grow grains with nutrition and greater yield. Previously, humans had necessarily followed migratory herds and food sources that changed with seasons and weather cycles. Only in the Holocene epoch did homo sapiens accelerate the development of agriculture, exchange of resources, trade, and language skills. Transportation, writing, standards of measurement, art, contracts—all these and other components to “civilize” life evolved.

The advance and progress these capacities brought, organized humans in new ways. Advance and “progress” did not automatically empower all equally. Power and wealth concentrated among some even at the expense of others and of nature herself. Occupations increased in specialization. Villages became towns; towns became cities. Huge ambivalences regarding justice emerged. Contradictory views on good and evil emerged and expanded throughout civilization as its story unfolded over millennia to the present (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization).

In time, rules for owning land privately and making economic exchanges through money greatly accelerated the civilization story, a story that became more and more a story of economic domination, and more and more a story of the domination of the homo sapiens species over all others. The good and evil in this evolving story is staring us down today—12,000 years from its beginning, just a staccato note in the music of Earth and Cosmos.

Today, it is common for humans to function with amnesia regarding the recentness of our presence as part of Earth’s majestic trajectory. For that reason, putting ourselves in the geological timeline adjusts the lens we use for seeing how we fit in with Earth herself. It gives us a perspective that the human civilization story does not. The geological timeline reveals important truth missed by the civilization story, namely, that for hundreds of thousands of years homo sapiens lived WITHIN the story of a single planet. For all those years on Earth, we humans did not threaten the carrying capacity of Earth to sustain and regenerate life. We fit.

Despite this important revelation, most modern human beings will not find much in this evolutionary timeline to excite us for living today. After all, have we not evolved to a higher level of consciousness and capacity than those primitive peoples? Are primitive peoples not dying out, a relic of past times? What is there for us to aspire to among the uncivilized? Do they not need to be brought into the modern world? None of us wants to be a hunter or gatherer today.

Today, words like “primitive” and “uncivilized” are used to emphasize the inferior status of these early humans compared to us. They had not yet evolved to our advanced brain capacities or cultural complexities. Against this usage, and in light of how modern humans exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, I want to emphasize that “primitive” also means first, primary, primal or foundational; and “uncivilized” also refers to capacities that all of us have to this day which we can use to undo or resist “civilizing” influences that we determine to be unhealthy for us and our planet.