It's Time to STOP Talking About "Climate Change" and Focus Instead on Real Environmentalism
Big, top-down and corporate “green” solutions won’t save us. Imagine if we focused on creating healthy local communities and lives? The solutions to ecocide can only be found in the soul.
OVERALL BOTTOM LINE
Big, top-down “green” solutions won’t save us. The mainstream environmental movement has collectively put us to sleep and mesmerized the public into believing that magical solutions can save the planet. We are placing a massive bet that a handful of global, corporate-controlled efforts such as giant solar farms, wind farms, and electric cars can suddenly reverse climate change and reduce environmental destruction, with little to no actual change in how we live our day-to-day lives.
Society needs to take the opposite approach. We need a strong collection of smaller, less sexy solutions, focused on essential needs that involve an endless list of local community and individual hands working collectively on a day-to-day basis to create a complete transition from the big and global to the small and local.
Everything could revolve around two main action items: we need to establish strong local food networks to address our most basic human need; and we need to focus the creation of jobs and purchasing of goods at the local level, centered on individual community selling, purchasing, and trading websites. Everything can revolve around these two main fundamental pillars.
No doubt an aggressive implementation plan of local controlled food, jobs, and shelter would produce enormous benefits to our environment and personal health.
WHY SHOULD YOU ENGAGE
Why put in the considerable effort it would require from most everyone to engage in this transformation in how our society operates? Because if we don’t, our children will live in a world characterized by desolate landscapes of toxicity, with unbearable heat and rivers of microplastics flowing through their bodies and veins. Average life expectancy will be on a sharp decline (it already has started to decline in America today), with people living out unhealthy lives within a Matrix-like political system completely devoid of any freedoms. Militarized police forces will roam every street of America, with the general population constantly ratting out their fellow miserable neighbor. No freedoms, no happiness, with most people just cogs in the soulless machine serving an extremely small group of global elites.
Easily put, this is the future we face and frighteningly soon if radical and positive changes are not planted now. We can and should start the long journey of transforming our built landscape so that people in future generations have a fighting chance to manage their conditions more positively. In addition, by aggressively taking action to change the course of humanity, at the very minimum, it would send a powerful message to the dark forces flowing through our universe, which would do wonders for our collective psyche. The worst possible thing for our generation’s legacy is if we just decided to capitulate and give in despite all the evidence of the need for strong action. If we are to go down, we need to go down swinging and be able to say that at least we fucking tried. We still have real choices in how we shape our future, but decisions for the better will not come from any established institutions. It must come from the people at the ground level.
THE PARADOX OF CLIMATE CHANGE
While climate change is one of the main driving forces for the need to radically change course, paradoxically, the worst thing that has happened to the broader environmental movement has been the almost complete takeover of environmentalism by the laser focus on “climate change,” along with the overreliance on dry, scientific statistics and language to drive everything. You will never, ever motivate people on the much deeper level needed to make real change by constantly hammering people over the head with doomsday predictions and endless distant and macro level statistics. Like everything in life, at the end of the day, this is a people issue. We need to reach the general population on a much deeper level, which is at the level of the heart and soul in order to pique our natural instincts.
We need to be much lighter on our feet with our strategy and actions. Put the challenge of improving the environment within the language of a series of local, small-scale actions that everyone can meaningfully engage in on a daily basis. The key is to set up our society in a way that people almost forget that their everyday actions are saving the environment while simultaneously improving their communities, health, and level of happiness.
The climate movement is the perfect example of the problem when “science” and scientific thinking overtakes everything. Science and data most certainly have a critical place, but it can’t be the constant focus. In other words, the best way to actually address climate change is to not even talk about climate change. Imagine if we drastically slowed talk about “climate change” and simply discussed creating healthy communities and lives? Small pivots in tactics can make all the difference. We need to focus on the everyday concerns that are right in front of our faces. This would greatly help in tapping into people’s deep emotions, which is critically important to gathering the critical mass of people needed to move the needle in a positive direction. The mainstream language used in the modern environmental movement is much too heavy, large-scaled, and depressing.
Not surprisingly, with all the stresses people are facing on multiple fronts, combined with the absence of leadership, and lack of a clear and coherent path forward, we are seeing a frightening level of censorship building up and drive to destroy people’s lives who do not conform to conventional thinking. Many people are waking up in a big way, are angry, and are ready to act, all of which are good things. But, at a general level, we are rudderless. We want society to go someplace better but are having a hard time explaining and envisioning what that place can look like on an everyday practical and comprehensive level.
Thus, the current anger we see in the general population is not being channeled nearly as well as it needs to be in order to make deep and sustainable change. Still, if we can establish a coherent vision to strive for, we have an unprecedented opportunity right now to make the changes we need to put us on the right path in a relatively quick amount of time. But we better do this soon. The fuel can burn out quickly if there is no vision. Plus, the general public will quickly get tired, bored, and begin to turn on “change” if change becomes synonymous with destruction, censorship, and blame. This would ensure the dark entities ability to piggyback off our justified rage and lead us down a far darker path involving a combination of 1984 and Brave New World. Our future is either this dark path or an alternative beautiful world path full of empowered people and local communities. The road we take will be cemented within the next couple of years. Periods of momentous change don’t last long and the ultimate path gets decided quickly.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Raise your hand if you have experienced this before. As a conscious and concerned citizen, you seek out ways to meaningfully engage and make a difference. So, you grab a book; watch a podcast; read an environmental advocacy website; and attend events featuring prominent environmentalists. No matter what the venue or who you listen to, it is almost always the same thing. Information is presented like a sledgehammer to the head that not only drowns you with how awful and essentially hopeless the situation is, but you get bombarded with endless dry but important sounding stats, such as degrees of global Celsius warming. Then, after this long and brutal trip, you come to the last five minutes of the drawn-out speech or article for so-called solutions to “stop climate change.”
If you haven’t gone too far down this road, let me summarize. In a nutshell, despite almost universal agreement by scientists and leading environmentalists that our grandchildren will be living in hellish conditions if we stay on the current path, the message for average people is essentially to just sit back and let the experts figure it all out. It is tantamount to waking up in the middle of the night with your house engulfed in flames and deciding as the head of the household that the first thing to do is to run out and call the authorities, hoping they arrive on time to save your family, as opposed to ensuring your spouse and children get out safely as well.
It is infuriating to see all these well-meaning people rightly tell us how dire the situation is, only to then turn around and basically tell the average person that there is nothing really for them to do other than feel really bad and guilty; send lots of money to large environmental organizations; shout political slogans; support standard politicians in their supposed “fight” for us and generally put all our trust into the current disconnected system that has gotten us in this mess in the first place: corporate driven “solutions” such as carbon credit schemes, or typical top-down and massively expensive, bureaucratic, dated, and inflexible federal government “green new deal” programs, with most of that money syphoned off by global corporations and their shareholders.
Within this framework, too often you will leave the lecture or web page feeling defeated and that the situation is helpless. Nothing you could do in your daily life really matters in the current narrative and setup. Often the writer, organization, or speaker admits they don’t have actual solutions—they are just looking to point out the dire situation. We are now well past the time of simply critiquing and lamenting where we are. We need action from everyone, everywhere. All hands are needed on deck.
If there are on the ground action items mentioned for average people, it is almost always focused on the technology-centered ideas of solar panels and electric cars. These ideas make us feel better, as it allows us to believe we can continue to live our current oversized lives. However, this mainstream narrative that technology alone will save us and that we can continue to be driven by “economic growth” and ever more accumulation of “goods” by more people is the definition of putting lipstick on a pig. It is completely naive to think solar panels and electric cars can be the central strategy to saving the planet, but we have collectively bought in to this magical thinking. Any positive benefits that solar panels and electric cars bring quickly gets negated within the same old system of more growth and the overtaking of additional global resources and land.
For example, solar panels can play a small part in a more sustainable future if guided by the soul and small-scale thinking. However, the sad reality is that giant global corporations drive the solar panel industry just like everything else and as a result solar panels are and will actually make climate change worse. The slick marketing of solar panels is that they are this green miracle that “will save the planet,” similar to other false solutions such as electric cars and giant wind farms. The reality is that the actual production of solar panels, electric cars, and wind turbines are incredibly dirty and toxic. They require an enormous amount of energy, toxic chemicals, hard-to-reach minerals from dirty mining pits, and are produced in large numbers in faraway places such as China in horrible working conditions. They also have a relatively short shelf life (but are a nightmare to try and recycle), among many other inconvenient problems. In other words, the full life cycle cost of development eliminates any sort of positive carbon gain that is achieved at just the surface and immediate level for energy generation for the user. Then, you add on the fact of the broader consumer culture. All too often, many users of mainstream “green energy” will simply use the hyper-focused individual carbon gains to then go out and build a bigger house in a more remote part of the suburbs, drive a bigger SUV, buy more things from Amazon from across the globe, and travel more, using the same if not more energy and resources than before they slapped a few Chinese made solar panels on their roof. In the end, we are worse off but a few preachers of supposed green solutions to saving the planet get to feel righteous and talk holier-than-thou to the general population.
THINK SMALL AND SIMPLY ACT
We need to stop overthinking and overanalyzing and having our collective spirit overwhelmed by our horrible top-down and technology-centered mainstream environmental strategy. We need to take things into our own hands via an on the ground proactive strategy that creates beauty around us, focusing on our lifestyles as the central strategy for improving the environment.
Follow the big money. Our collective environmental efforts are being led by the largest global banks and corporations, often the biggest polluters on the planet. Because of their reliance on funding, most prominent environmental groups have been bought off by corporations, relegating citizens to shouting empty slogans and promoting hollow actions. We have fallen into a deadly vortex, driven by modern man’s disease of always seeking quick fixes and easy sounding “solutions.” In other words, trying to have it both ways, i.e., pursue ideas that make us feel good and feel like we are making a difference, but not changing our fundamental lifestyle and the typical ways we deliver goods, food, jobs, and shelter whatsoever.
The same thing can be said for our economic development strategy. Everybody deep down knows our current systematic setup does not work for most people. We have endless proof based on the historic levels of our current wealth gap, low paying jobs, horrible health, etc. But the discussion always falls back to the old, tired, and limited capitalism vs. socialism battle. Any criticism of capitalism means you are automatically a socialist or communist in the mainstream. It is true that socialism is not the answer to our problems. In short, the problem with traditional socialism is that big and top-down systems severely limit ingenuity, freedoms, and creative ways of living life. However, the point here is there are multiple ways we can run our system under the umbrella of capitalism. Our current capitalistic system has been taken over by monopolistic entities. The solution is returning to the ideals of small business growth at the community level.
“THE SCIENCE” IS THE NEW GOD
“Science” is the new God for huge segments of our modern society. Science will never replace the importance of the soul. As the band System of a Down sang in 2001, “Science has failed our Mother Earth…..Spirit moves through all things.” Science allows mankind to live beyond her means. True human progress can only occur at the level of the spirit.
In the end, science and technology are neither good nor bad; they are simply reflections of our human intentions and could be used for either good or bad. The problem is that like most things, standard scientific thought has been completely taken over by greed and the power-hungry. The results are disastrous and dire. Yes, Mother Earth is on life support and mainstream, corporate-driven science and consumerism are pushing the health of our planet over the cliff. In addition, corporate driven science has led us to mass depression, massive chronic health problems, and the edge of mass species and habitat destruction. Science enabled and made things such as the atomic bomb and episodes of genocide easier. The solutions to our climate catastrophe and ecocide are only found in the soul. We need to develop a hatred of waste of any kind.
Making a real difference requires a relentless and steady list of micro actions centered at the community level, with locally derived solutions. It needs to be a leaderless movement involving small, daily actions taken by everyone that add up to big change at the collective level. These heart and soul-driven actions are often unsexy sounding and low tech, involving substantial amounts of blood, sweat, dirty hands, and tears. We need to trust our basic survival instincts, with simple and grounded solutions, focused on our family, well-being, food, communities, passions, jobs, and livelihood. Creativity and flexibility in order to best take advantage of people’s natural talents and abilities is key. We all need to grow and evolve with this movement. There is a tremendous amount of skills development just waiting to be discovered by all of us.
I don’t pretend to be an expert or have all the answers. I am very far from it. But my wife and I are trying. We love to learn from others and love being inspired by those that are doing much more than we are. It’s all a process and road we are happy to be traveling.
Great piece, Ted!