My feeling is there are a lot more artists / artistically inclined folks than we think, but colonizer-consumerist-capitalist culture discourages people from expressing those inclinations in any way. CCC culture (and creeping fascism) ridicules the arts (other than sometimes in a “museum/upperclass WASP”-sanctioned, setting).

If we have the audacity to do it as our job/career/calling, mainstream culture calls it irresponsible or useless or bad life choices.

Same with any of the humanities: anthropology, philosophy, etc.

We are the only ones who can dismantle this stranglehold. Art is revolution. Reducing our need to earn money, and reducing other aspects of our dependence on the “official” system, is revolution.

Permaculture, occupational co-ops are one way to build a resilient parallel structure.

Art and creativity in all forms is absolutely essential; we cannot allow our sick culture to tell us otherwise.

For many of us everyday people, throughout the ages, art has taken the form of the common household items we make (or adapt). Clothing, linens, furniture, tools. Many old tools were artistically embellished by their users.

I use the phrase “mailbag” loosely here, to indicate communication that comes my way via email, social-media comments, or whatever channel. Here are a couple that stood out for me as needing thought and response. (Some comments may be edited for brevity or to protect the person’s privacy.)

1. From a friend & neighbor (via a local group we both belong to on social media): “Jenny Nazak, you are such an inspirational neighbor. The evidence of your touch is constantly spreading. I’ve heard neighbors say, I really want to use some chemicals, but I’m afraid Jenny will catch me. LOL.”

This bugged me immensely but I had to think for a bit to figure out why. After reflecting on it a bit, I felt clearer. Here is the response I would give them:

1 – Why would you put the approval of one neighbor ahead of the wellbeing of our entire beautiful planet and all her creatures, including yourself and all other fellow humans?

2 – So if I have to move out of the neighborhood, or if I die before you, you’re going to feel free to start poisoning the pollinators, birds, pets, aquatic wildlife, waterways, your household, and other humans, just so you can have a perfectly neat lawn or whatever?

(Oh, and I would add that I would be happy to help them come up with healthy alternatives to deal with the situation that is prompting them to feel like they want or need to use chemicals.)

And, my response to the friend/neighbor who shared this bit of neighborhood intel with me:

Fear of my disapproval is the WRONG reason for them not to use chemicals. They should be motivated by concern for waterways, wildlife, & their own family’s health! (including pets). I do hope more people are waking up to the urgency of things!

That said, you are an awesome neighbor and thank you for respecting Mother Earth and caring for our fellow humans too!!

And thank you for prompting me to engage in this reflection!

*************

2. From a fellow activist offering a rideshare: “Unfortunately, I’ll be driving a minivan. It’s not the most eco-friendly method of transportation, but we’ve been in the market for an EV for a while now. Anyway, if you’re okay with riding in a minivan, I’d be happy to give you a ride.”

My response:

Rideshare is always better than each person traveling alone. BTW electric vehicles are not necessarily “better” in eco terms. And the footprint of any new vehicle is significant (manufacture of new vehicle, etc.). The most eco-friendly vehicle is oftentimes the one that a person already has, coupled with ridesharing and errand consolidation and other basic ways of optimizing usage; cutting unnecessary trips.

What I would have said as well if I had thought of it: Seriously. You are offering me a ride. PLEASE don’t apologize for your car! Also, as eco-activists we need to be aware that electric cars are not some world-saving panacea that will rescue us from having to change our habits. If you want ideas for reducing your transportation footprint, I’m happy to help! Don’t apologize to me though.

3 – General comment to a lot of my fellow eco folk who say they look to me for inspiration, but who seem (rather than being inspired) to just be stuck in feeling guilty and apologizing: I’m here to support you in your stated aspiration to live more lightly on the earth; I’m not here to grant you absolution. If we should be apologizing to anyone it’s to the communities and ecosystems we have wrecked with our colonizer consumerist culture. But really we just need to stop apologizing & feeling guilty; just set about making changes.

*************

PS. The main demographic I’m addressing, my target audience, is the same group that first made me realize I needed to write my book DEEP GREEN. The same group I myself belong to: white; self-described environmentalist or at least “environmentally concerned”; Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-64). I have literally never heard the abovementioned kinds of comments come out of the mouth of anyone who doesn’t fall into all three of these categories. White eco-boomers, our generation is huge in number; our cultural norms have done more harm to people and the planet than all previous generations combined; we have spending power; we have social influence; we have white privilege; and we need to use our power to dismantle the colonizer culture. No excuses.

PPS. My book was originally going to be titled GREEN SMACKDOWN, but I decided that sounded a bit harsh. I now think a bit of edge might be needed though. Call it a bit of tough love mixed with the TLC I set out to offer. Fellow white, environmentalist, Boomers, I’m calling you in!

A good succinct definition of Degrowth:

“Degrowth is a planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in rich countries to reduce environmental pressures and inequalities, while improving well-being. It has four main characteristics: sustainability, justice, well-being and democracy. Unlike a recession, degrowth is not accidental and general but chosen and selective. It is a societal project that aims to abandon the race for monetary accumulation in favour of a vision of development centred on social health and ecological resilience.”

(“Degrowth goes more far beyond reduction of GDP”; by Timothée Parrique, in Polytechnique insights.)

There’s a big Facebook group for local issues in my area. It tends to generate a lot of polarized discussion. Someone posted a question to the effect, “How do we increase the safety of public schools?” Predictably, a large percentage of responses fell into two camps:

1) We need to make it not so easy for people to access guns. Especially young people, especially people with mental-health issues. And make it difficult or impossible for people to get their hands on semiautomatic weapons. And

2) We need MORE guns. Arm the teachers! And MORE security. Barriers, locks, etc.

As you can probably guess, I side with the “camp 1” type comments.

Also I added some comments of my own:

• For a long time, I have been a staunch advocate of homeschooling, neighborhood co-op schooling, and unschooling. Even if not for the shootings. Recent events just reinforce my stance.

• Quote from Caitlin Johnstone: “If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

“There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.”

(My point in sharing this quote here is to observe that our society is sick. We have gone off the rails, and certain dysfunctional trends seem to have accelerated over the past 20 or 30 years. The rampant consumerism, the militarization, the glamorizing of violence, the shredding of economic and social safety nets.

(Mental health is definitely a huge part of the mass shootings and other violent incidents, but maybe in a different way than we have tended to think. Yes, some individuals are going off the rails. But I think the deeper root is a societal descent into craziness. It’s hard to put into words, I feel shy talking like this in a big general-public space like this, but I know some of you know what I’m talking about. Now of course, we can’t as individuals just fix societal craziness. And it won’t be fixed by voting (though yes we all DO need to vote). What we can do as individuals is what I see a lot of people doing: small individual daily acts that increase kindness and connection, cohesion, compassion. We all have to look out for each other and not rely on guns and walls and metal detectors to provide “security.”

(Finally, no offense to teachers (it is not their fault), but if it were up to me, I would not send anyone’s kid into the prisonlike places our schools seem to have become more and more. Prisonlike both physically and mentally.)

In my book, I mention that I’ve found it helpful to deliberately moderate my intake of news. This doesn’t mean avoiding reality; it just means not taking in more media stories than I need to stay informed and on-task.

I’m well aware of the biospheric crisis, and don’t gain anything from hooking myself up to a steady drip-feed of horrific reports.

Then again, taking in a certain amount of the really scary news helps me maintain a healthy sense of urgency. When I say sense of urgency — in my case, I always know it’s urgent, but sometimes I need to be nudged to step up my communication with public officials and community leaders. The scary stories help me with that by reminding me of what’s at stake. Also they help me feel less “weird” and “goofy” in the face of mainstream people (or even fellow environmentalists sometimes) looking askance at what they see as my “excessively radical” lifestyle.

The horrifying news reminds me that nope, my lifestyle’s not at all inappropriate given the gravity of the situation. So when I find myself hanging back in my civic communication and other advocacy, I make sure to take in some scary climate coverage, backed by science, from the sources I trust. On the other hand, if I find myself getting despondent to the point of being paralyzed or nihilistic, I have no qualms about taking a news break. And this is my suggestion for everyone: Regulate your media intake as needed.

Here’s the latest horrifying report I’ve read. From Umair Haque, writing at medium.com The Age of Extinction Is Here — Some Of Us Just Don’t Know It Yet :

“My friends in the Indian Subcontinent tell me stories, these days, that seem like science fiction. The heatwave there is pushing the boundaries of survivability. My other sister says that in the old, beautiful city of artists and poets, eagles are falling dead from the sky. They are just dropping dead and landing on houses, monuments, shops. They can’t fly anymore.

“The streets, she says, are lined with dead things. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Animals of all kinds are just there, dead. They’ve perished in the killing heat. They can’t survive.

“People, too, try to flee. They run indoors, spend all day in canals and rivers and lakes, and those who can’t, too, line the streets, passed out, pushed to the edge. They’re poor countries. We won’t know how many this heatwave has killed for some time to come. Many won’t even be counted.

“Think about all that for a moment. Really stop and think about it. Stop the automatic motions of everyday life you go through and think about it.

“You see, my Western friends read stories like this, and then they go back to obsessing over the Kardashians or Wonder Woman or Johnny Depp or Batman. They don’t understand yet. Because this is beyond the limits of what homo sapiens can really comprehend, the Event. That world is coming for them, too.

“The analogy is often used to describe ‘climate change’ of frogs in a boiling pot. It’s useful, but only to a certain degree. When the pot boils, they’re taken out and eaten. We were in a boiling pot, and now we’re at the stage where we’re about to get taken out and eaten. This is when things start to get really, really bad — really, really fast.

“I don’t use the words ‘climate change’ to describe any of this, because, well, they’re inadequate. The way that we tell that story has led to a kind of shocking sense of apathy and ignorance about the reality of what we face. People read the science, and think that if the temperature rises by one degree, two, three, what’s the big deal? Ha ha! Who cares? That’s not even a hot day? Wrong. A better way to tell that story is something like this. On average, when the temperature rises one degree, the seasons change by a factor of ten at equatorial regions. One degree, one point five, which is where we are now — the summers are ten to fifteen degrees Celsius hotter. Two degrees? Twenty. Three degrees? Thirty.

“We’re heading for three degrees.

“It’s already 50 degrees Celsius in the Subcontinent. Spain is bracing for an extreme heatwave, of about 40 degrees plus as is Europe, as is much of America. That’s at one degree or so of global warming. At two degrees? The Subcontinent hits 60 degrees Celsius. Spain and Europe hit 50. At three degrees? Equatorial regions hit 70 degrees Celsius or more. Spain and Europe hit 60.

“Extinction happens.

“This is the threshold. We are already hitting it. We can see it now in startling, grim, vivid detail. The Event is not some kind of abstraction or prediction. Extinction is now really happening in plain sight in places around the globe — and they are revealing to us the limits of what our civilization can survive. That limit is hit somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees. After that point, life as we know it comes to an end.

“My Western friends still don’t really grasp this at all. They imagine that as the seasons get exponentially hotter, they can simply…turn up the air conditioning. LOL. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. Why not? Not just because energy grids will fail, or even because at a certain point even air conditioning just fails. It’s because of life.

“My Western friends don’t think these days. This fantasy of turning up the air conditioning and sitting in your apartment or house? They ignore the now obvious signs. Birds falling from the sky, Dead things lining the streets. What are you going to do, sit in your air conditioned home while everything else goes extinct?

“It doesn’t work like that. Those things, those beings — birds, cows, sheep, chickens, whatever — they provide us with the basics, too. They perish, we perish. Insects nourish our soil, birds eat insects, and on and on. My Western friends don’t understand that we are part of systems. Ecosystems, in this case. And as their foundations are ripped out, we can scarcely survive. The idea that you can sit in your air conditioned home in comfort while everything else goes extinct is a fantasy, a delusion. What will you eat? Who will turn the soil? Who’ll keep the crops healthy? Where will the basics of life come from?

“Our civilization collapses somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees Celsius. Bang, poof, gone. Nothing works after that point. Everything begins to die — not just animals and us in the case, but our systems which depend on them. Economics crater, inflation skyrockets, people grow poorer, fascism erupts as a consequence. You can already see that beginning to happen around the globe — but it’s just the beginning. Imagine how much worse inflation’s going to get when Extinction really begins to bite.”

https://eand.co/the-age-of-extinction-is-here-some-of-us-just-dont-know-it-yet-7001f5e0c79a

SenseOfUrgency

Some things I’ve shared in recent conversations in Degrowth & Deep Adaptation circles:

According to my observations and experience: Individual choices when coupled with the phenomenon of social contagion lead to popular trends and movements. These grassroots trends and movements in turn serve as a “trim-tab” or foot in the door for influencing corporate decisions & government policies. Which then ripple throughout society.

One example, from an area of my work, is the landscaping industry. Hyper-manicured, chemically intensive lawns, maintained by “professional lawn services”, became a super widespread craze starting in the 1990s. One homeowner, one lawn at a time, it turned into a multibillion-dollar industry, which has gone on to influence government policy. Hyper-manicured, chemically intensive landscaping is now essentially codified as law, or at least has an official blessing as the “gold standard”, in many parts of the USA.

The dominance of lawns and other toxic, nonnative, inedible landscaping is obviously undesirable to ecosystems, biodiversity, local food security and more.

But, beneficial actions can in the same manner become fads, crazes, trends, movements started by a few — but then go on to wield influence over corporate decisions, public policy.

NO, individual actions alone are not enough, or wouldn’t be, if each of us lived in isolation. Cultural transmission is the key ingredient.

We can make it COOL to consume less to the point of actually doing degrowth in our everyday lives. Many subcultures and groups are doing some version of that right now, and our actions if taken together are adding up.

Of course defining anticonsumerism and degrowth as fun and cool has to be accompanied by anti-war push. Demilitarization is key. In my country (USA) and I think many other countries nowadays, militarization and other authoritarianism is getting popular acceptance, and we have to push back against that, offer alternatives to help people feel secure.

Oh, and any of us who have the freedom to do so, need to depopularize financial “growth”. Transition all our money out of Wall Street, cryptocurrencies, and anything else that’s based on “financial growth”; invest in our local communities & tangible real assets such as local food systems, rainwater harvesting, community housing trusts etc. And also help our kids & grandkids & other young people in our communities find ways to have a real livelihood while avoiding taking on huge college loans and so on.

*******

I actually think that the degrowth grassroots movement could end up carrying enough weight, that we become in essence a de facto “country” in terms of strength and numbers.

Basically I’m talking about popularizing degrowth via the social contagion that naturally happens when people find ways and practices that build their security and enrich their lives.

Social media are of course a huge handy vehicle for beneficial social contagion of degrowth, permaculture, etc. But the contagion can and does happen the old-fashioned way too. Neighbors chatting; people writing letters to friends etc.

Voluntary degrowth on the personal level, by those of us who have the means to do it, is an adaptive best practice that can help ease suffering on the collective level.

*******

(In response to a persistent idea among some degrowth/anticonsumerist folks that “the cities must be abandoned”):

I do degrowth in my everyday life in my city, and help others do the same, in any way they are willing. Small actions add up to collective action. Growing food, sharing food, collecting rainwater and learning how to live on it.

Localizing our investments. Minimizing our need to earn money.

Developing cooperation, compassion, & other skills for working w people and getting along.

Human settlements have always existed in both urban and rural form. Cities aren’t going away.

****

And now, more wise words from Kirk Hall, a fellow Degrowth group member who has on multiple occasions allowed me to share his words on this blog:

“Degrowth is ‘soft’ revolution, revolution-lite. It’s not tipping the apple cart over, it’s a polite suggestion the apple cart be moved to a new location. Seriously though, getting people to farm their yards, balconies, and rooftops is revolutionary. Getting people to co-house, cut their hours and participate in farming and food rescue is revolutionary. Forming Co-op businesses and various unions is revolutionary. … It has to happen at a faster pace, but the breaking down of the normal system is going to cause more people to look for alternatives.”

Hyperconsumerist rich Anglo/Euro-Western industrialized culture is by and large not taking its medicine, in terms of heeding Mother Earth’s ample and generous warnings.

To start, let’s focus in on the category of transportation. That is one of the several main factors in our outsized footprint (others include food/agriculture, home energy use, and purchases of consumer goods).

In the category of gasoline prices and transportation in general, here are some examples of what “not taking our medicine” looks like:

• blaming the president for “high” gas prices
• whining to our red-meat governors to do something about gas prices (such as remove the gasoline tax etc.)
• whining, in general — we Americans should not have to put up with this! (Or as one past president put it, “Our American way of life is not negotiable” )
• the media putting out all sorts of articles promoting irresponsible, mindless, unnecessary travel (cruise ships, flights, etc.)
• persisting with our gas-hogging manicured landscaping
• being all eager to “get back to normal life” as if the pandemic were just some random anomalous blip

Here are some examples of what taking our medicine might look like:

• our soi-disant “climate leader” president could stop his constant jetting around the country and the planet, and instead take the lead in insisting on having meetings by Zoom
• local governments strongly incentivizing public transportation, cycling, walking, ride-sharing
• local leaders (including government, business, and popular opinion leaders) encouraging people who are able to do so, to do errands on foot or bicycle whenever possible, maybe using “health and fitness” as an additional hook
• local governments putting moratoriums on car-dependent sprawl development; moratoriums on any more new roads
• local governments and local businesses working together to popularize delivery services as an alternative to everyone hopping in their cars to shop
• media running articles about simple ways for families to enjoy leisure time close to home
• block captains and other neighborhood leaders organizing music jams, crafting bees, Repair Cafés, coffee chats in the park …
• moving closer to family, if we have been habitually traveling thousands of miles a year to see them
• all of us really looking at how many hours we spend getting from point A to point B day in and day out: adding it up; noticing the toll it is taking; deciding to make big changes in our lives to reclaim our time and energy
• reducing the footprint of our landscaping by using our lawns, balconies, and public spaces to grow food for humans, and native plants for pollinators and other wildlife
• recognizing that the pandemic forced us to make some changes in our daily habits that ended up being good for people and the planet, and should be continued

This is just a brief list, and I’m not saying everyone must do everything on the list. I do think we (consumerist rich nations dominated by Anglo/colonialist-rooted norms) need to be whining a lot less and taking our medicine a lot more.

Finally, I will repeat something I’ve often said before — and that many other people, far knowledgeable than me, have said, with lots of science to back them up. The price of gasoline, especially in the USA, does not come even remotely close to reflecting its true cost — to people and all other species, and to ecosystems.

Oh, and finally-finally, it’s not the working-class and lower-income people who I am saying need to take their medicine and suck it up. It’s the affluent tier of the middle class, and above. Those of us who have options. We need to exercise leadership and show that it’s possible to be very happy and fulfilled, by living much more simply than we have been. We need to reset the norms.