Reflections on Abundance

Freeport, Maine

Note to Readers:

In writing these notes about my own process of waking into a world whose Code Red alarm is blinking wildly, I risk sounding like a finger-pointing scold, a scowling old aunt with tie shoes and frizzy hair, standing in judgment of myself and you, readers.  And I risk making you feel bad.  One reader told me that last week’s blog made her feel blamed for living her own unexamined good life, and less willing to take action. I am sorry for that. 

What I am trying to do instead of judge is to understand. In my fifty years of work, I’ve seen, over and over, that understanding how one’s mind or one’s parent’s or partner’s mind was shaped leads to empathy and self-acceptance.  I am trying to understand how I came to process my aspirations for the “good life” and my perceptions of the consequences of leading that life; not judge.  Judgement is truly not what fills the inner chatter in my head.  Instead, what I find there is awe at how powerfully early cultural beliefs, around progress and the idea of separation from nature and from each other, have shaped my brain’s ability to think outside those culturally formed categories and beliefs, to see things as they are, instead of as my brain has been shaped to see them. But I don’t want to fool myself or you. The stakes are high. If our brains are not able to embrace an entirely new paradigm about life, what life will be left to us?

Reflections on Abundance

Abundance.  If there is a holiday in the calendar that prompts the word abundance to come to mind, Thanksgiving surely leads the way (followed, oh so quickly, with hardly time to digest one’s apple pie by Christmas). 

Images of tables groaning with overflowing platters of golden roast turkeys, creamed onions bubbling brown at the edges, cinnamon colored pumpkin pie, fill years and years of my memories of Thanksgiving feasts.  Thanksgiving—a day when a surfeit of family and friends squeeze together at one table, summon a brief moment of gratitude before we dive into our feast, eat too much of everything, sometimes drink too much wine.   

But abundance itself was nothing special for a white, middle-class girl born 11 months before WWII ended.  Abundance is the language which shaped my mind, my way of life, my decisions, and expectations for the future. Abundance has been like air, the unquestioned condition of all life: progress, growth, amber wave of grain, from sea to shining sea.  America!!   

I remember when the idea of global abundance first took hold in my family.  I was not older than ten when we awaited the arrival by mail each month of a gift from a company called the Gift of the Month Club.  The idea was that each month some exotic gift from a far-away place would arrive.  Embedded in the tissue paper was a story about the gift: where it came from, how it was made.  I still have one of those gifts: a small, ebony carved elephant, which once sported two real ivory tusks.  I’ve given it to my granddaughter, who likely can’t fathom the idea that having something arrive from far across the globe is the least bit remarkable. Or that ivory tusks were once harvested with no thought to the elephant’s well-being.

I have lived these almost 77 years giddily participating in the boundless feasts served up by a fossil fuel chef, who promised he could, like a magician, lay the table with anything I wanted from all over the world.  It was as if all those shiny things that appeared when he waved his wand and pulled off the magician’s cloth really did come from out of nowhere and when I was through with them, abracadabra, the magician would make them go away! Away!

Like the Everly Brothers’ 1958 song which I played over and over on a portable RCA record player in my families’ newly remodeled basement, my life was infused with these lines:

All I have to do is dream, dream dream dream, dream. 

The story of Earth’s journey from a biosphere where all life— from underground fungus to hemlock tree and strawberry fields and butterflies and chimpanzees and humans was supported by interconnected systems of air and water and land to a place where all current forms of life are threatened with extinction and suffering is a story that spans a single lifetime: mine.  It’s mind-boggling! 

In my lifetime, the wheels of abundance: global trade and industrialization, industrial farming, ocean transport, long-haul trucking, intercontinental highways, consumerism, advertising, drove fossil fuel use, literally, through the sky.  85% of the excess carbon in the atmosphere was emitted since 1945.  And except for a few years back in the mid-seventies, I never stopped to wonder: where does this food come from, this cotton sweater, this velvet couch, this new dishwasher?  How was it grown, mined, manufactured, transported to my doorstep?  Who are the people who made this, how are they treated, what do the factories look like, what is all this stuff doing to life? I was totally clueless, in a dissociated state of mind which allowed me to be mentally and emotionally separate from the very things which supported my life.  

But beware!!  The fossil fuel magic chef is frantic for us not to tell this story, not to reveal his provender as the deadly poison it has become.  He wants you to believe that you don’t have to change anything, or that if you do, so little will be left on your plate you will be living a life of dismal scarcity.  He will tell you that he is such a powerful magician that he can invent giant machines that will scrub the air of all its excess carbon.  Or he will throw a spell over his goods, so that a green cloud descends, and blinds you to the new oil fields he is opening up, his leaking natural gas infrastructure. Or, he will distract you. To keep you from seeing him put the oily rabbit under the hat, he will point his finger at You, convince you that it’s all in your hands to save the planet. 

Like Eden, the story of boundless abundance is a myth. We can’t endlessly burn forests to make way for single crop farming or farm using nitrogen extracted from petroleum as food for soil.  With no nutrients of its own, soil dies, dries out, turns into desert.  Birds die. Insects die.  Dry soil emits no moisture into the atmosphere; thus clouds don’t form, drought and heat increase.  The land becomes uninhabitable, and people pack their belongings into a sack and leave their homes, small children strapped on their backs.  Blind to the cost of our feasts, when the climate immigrants get to our border after months or years of dangerous travel I have, until all too recently, been deaf to their knock on the door. 

The question I have this Thanksgiving is: what is the language of this moment?  If it is no longer boundless abundance, is it its opposite: scarcity?  If exuberant is the adjective that accompanies boundless abundance, is dispirited the adjective of this moment? 

I am not encouraged by the literature about what people like me: true believers in the science of global warming, alert and primed to do something now, can Do.  Most of the literature is of the doom and gloom genre: how little time there is left, how bad things are and how much worse they are going to get.

What this literature sorely lacks is imagination: stories about how communities can invent a narrative which recognizes the need to live in harmony with the ecosystems that enhance life, all life, on the planet.  I don’t want to read about how I can recycle my plastic bags or buy an electric car.  I get all that. I’ve done that. I want to know what a post-carbon, post fossil-fuel, post extractive economy here in my neck of the woods looks like; what principles people like me can use to make everyday decisions about what they wear and what they buy and where they live and what they eat and where they invest their money.  I want to know how they treat the frogs and open land and saltmarshes, and the newly arrived immigrant from Sudan; then I want to share these ideas and, in community with others, take the steps towards fulfilling these ideas—lively steps akin to tap dancing and salsa and the swing. 

In the process of my reading, I’ve discarded some language: recycle, green, sustainability, carbon neutral: all words whose meaning I am no longer sure of because most of this language has been co-opted by corporations wishing to look good but are instead hiding that oily rabbit under their fancy hats.  Also, none of those words inspire a way of life that is live-able.

But I am happy to report that I have found, simmering between the covers of a few books, language which offers an alternative to these words: interdependence, biosphere, regeneration.

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, is the title of Paul Hawken’s new book and the ideas behind the word regeneration support a world-wide movement he is creating.  It’s a beautiful book, filled with short inspiring and educational essays. The website, pairs solutions with ideas for actions, real people like me can take.  It is equally as beautiful as the book.  And it’s free. 

I urge you to order the book, browse the website.  I’ve included some quotes below of his work and plan to write more about how this very large and very exalted-sounding idea of regeneration translates into my own world here at the end of the dirt road, in the middle of the woods, at the edge of the sea. I also plan to ask our newly forming FreeportCAN group to help me envision a regenerative life which we imagine together and act on together.  There is far too much to reimagine all by myself.

But first, let me tell you where I’ve gone this week with these ideas about regeneration.  In honor of feasts, I’ve been thinking a lot about food: where it comes from, how it was grown. I am astonished at how hard it is to figure this out.  I am equally as surprised when I do! The basil paste I found in the produce section at our local market, all dolled up in packaging that somehow looked homey, came from Australia.  The organic kale hails from Minnesota.  It isn’t megatons but it’s something— the extra carbon it took to get that basil onto my plate, that kale into the soup, when all along it could have come from a farm next door.  The ginger root as well as the cashew nuts came from Nature’s Place, wherever that is!!

I’ve had a craving this week for all things orange: pumpkin and butternut squash and acorn squash and carrots: a vitamin A craving my friend T. advises.  I am happy to say that all the squash I’ve consumed has not turned my skin orange, but, instead, has made me very happy because all of it was grown this summer by my cousin, Pat, and her husband, Norm, in their garden Downeast.  Each meal reminds me of their generosity and kindness. 

Which brings me to the generosity and kindness of you, readers.  Thank you. Thank you.  Writing for you, readers, is…regenerative!! 

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Quotes from Regeneration by Paul Hawken:

Regeneration means putting life at the center of every act and decision….Nature and humanity are composed of exquisitely complex networks of relationships, without which forests, lands, oceans, peoples, countries, and cultures perish. Vital connections have been severed between human beings and nature; within nature itself; and between people, religions, governments and commerce.  This disconnection is the origin of the climate crisis. 

The proximate causes of climate crisis are cars, buildings, wars, deforestation, poverty, oil, corruption, coal, industrial agriculture, overconsumption, and fracking, among others.  All have the same origin: economic structures which degenerate life on earth…the financial system is abetting and investing in planetary liquidation. 

Regeneration is a radical new approach to the climate crisis, one that weaves justice, climate, biodiversity, and human dignity into a seamless tapestry of action, policy, and transformation that can end the climate crisis in one generation.

It comes down to this: Life creates the conditions for life.

What’s happened is we have created — inadvertently, mistakenly — an economic system that is the opposite (of life). It’s one that extracts life. If you follow the breadcrumb trail back into any supply chain, anything you buy, any service you receive, you will find that it is extracting life from the living world, from the oceans, from the land, from the forest and the soil — and from people, by the way.

We’re stealing the future from our children and their children and generations to come.