Paradigm Shift

I have been doing a lot of watching in last two years. I have done a lot of listening as well. Each month I struggled to gather my thoughts with enough evidence to make a post, and today...almost a year since creating this draft, I am going to do my best to unveil my honest, startling conclusion about the state of the world, and how to move forward.
The blockage of this Blog in my brain can attribute to a lack of other posts environmental related. I feel like this confession/interpretation/understanding is really the keystone to all my future environmental ethic. Which is also why it's taken me so long to produce. That said... it's very much in it's infant stages.

On a 70 mile drive back from San Lorenzo Canyon yesterday, I heard a quiet twenty year old get really loud. In fact, for about 15 minutes he wouldn't shut up. He wasn't yelling... but the tone in his voice was both angry and inspiring. It started from a simple question. Did he think that the efforts made by a non-profit organization he was a part were having their desired impact on the Foster Care system... a broken system in my much need of a revolution-- not unlike our country's education system. What struck me the most through his soap box response was not just his passion, but his hopelessness.


 Three years ago, I would spend a week at a time with a group of students from LA, guiding them in classes about water quality, the rock cycle and native plants, and hoping that they would come away with at least a small seed of environmental appreciation planted. On the final day, as they kids were lining up to take a bus back down to one of the biggest cities in the country, I would ask what they're going to do when they get home. "Take a LONNGGG shower!" was usually the response, much to the dismay of my efforts and the shrinking southern California water supply. But a few kids would speak up with the desired answers. "I learned to care for the Earth, cause it's all we have!" or "I'm going to reuse things in my house before I throw them away." Back then, my heart would be warmed by these answers.

I can't say what has changed in the last three years. Have *I* lost my flowery optimism for the world? Has the current political state and the farce of our presidential election system sucked the romance out of my dreams for the future? I think that the consistent ignorance towards the pleas, pushes and consequences given by renowned and respected scientists regarding Climate Change has left me with little faith in our current society.

E O Wilson's new book Half-Earth embraces the shift as well. Much different than his pleas in The Future of Life, Half-Earth fully embraces our "sixth-extinction," while suggesting some even bigger steps we're clearly not ready for. Wilson echo's the hopes of many- that we can we still pull together and change--and that we need to do it like, now (or yesterday).

I'm increasingly feeling that our last saving ship has sailed...Yet at the same time, I teach. I encourage that a slow path toward change will be the most lasting one. I still reach into trash cans to remove a water bottle or two. I still practice a vegan diet for mostly ethical reasons. I am committing my entire life to teaching the world around me of the value of our environment. So, why? If it's hopeless?


Because I don't think that our world is totally fucked. It's true I don't have the hope I did just two years ago, that we could still maintain homeostasis on this beautiful planet. I haven't given up hope... I've just shifted my view. And that twenty year old at the beginning of the story did too. Kids who years ago were preaching the importance of recycling, are now trying to figure out what their role will be in the great inevitable apocalyptic collapse. At least, the ones I hang out with.

A year ago I took a class from an herbalist about the local plants in my park. I thought that as caretaker, I should probably have greater knowledge of what's growing here. What really struck me from her wholistic, earth-loving lessons, was the way in which she spoke of two Class C invasive plants to New Mexico-- the Slippery Elm and Bindweed. Although both are a known nuisance in the state, she spoke of their medicinal and practical uses. It was the first time I realized that our world is shifting.


We, as a society, need to move away from business as usual (gosh, I've said that before), and embrace our changing climate. We may not all survive the coming floods and fires, but the quicker we embrace the plants that grow in the drought rather than pulling them, or practice building communities rather than facebook groups, the greater chance our species is going to have of surviving.

One thing that really struck me from this 20 year old's speech, was his plea for a leader. "We need change! We need a revolution...and we need someone to lead it". I wonder who that someone will be. I haven't lost hope in humanity, but I know we need to change the way we look at this world, if we're going to stay in it. I have had more and more conversations about the sad, decaying state of the world...no longer as a place we can salvage, but one we have to learn from quick, or suffer our own consequences. No more conversations about the possibilities of our planet, but decisions of what to hold on to. I waited a long time before publishing this conclusion, but I think it's time the world (reading this) knows...it's time to change your mind. We can no longer save us from ourselves. We can only prevent further damage.

"We are thinking organism trying to understand how the world works," write E. O. Wilson. "We will come awake"

The Shift (part 1- reframing the mind)

In the recent months I have had a number of dialogues regarding our pending environmental crisis. I had a humbling conversation with one co-worker about the difficulty of engaging in ‘business as usual’ practices when what I really feel like doing is laying down in front of a fracking truck, or crawling under a rock. I had a conversation with another coworker who asked if I believe that humans are the cause of our impending crisis. Of the incredible educators I work with, she was not the one I expected to cast doubts upon the climate crisis. Yet she had heard from her climate denying brother that there are normal swings in temperature change, and hoped that we’re in the middle of a natural shift. I also attended a book club in which four white women who work in environmental education expressed their frustrations with climate inaction, and shared stories of their increasingly sustainable habits (I was one of those women). 

6,000 members of 350.org Deutschland create a 7.5km chain near a coal pit-mine.

With these conversations reverberating in my brain, I've noticed a lot of talk about climate change recently, and none of it makes me feel comfortable. Almost every doom and gloom documentary I've seen or read recently have the same format. 98% doom forecasting evidenced by political stalling and an overall aversion to change and 2% vague concluding  scenarios that seem extremely unlikely given the basis of the documentary.  

It was in the theatre for one of these documentaries that  I experienced a shift in my attitude toward climate change.  I've been reading so much about how we have to act now, time is limited and that we’re dangerously close to a point of no return, and yet… we’re still so far behind. We’re debating the cause rather than investing in solutions. We’re denying evidence provided by people who devote their life to finding answers and instead listening to white men in shiny suits tell us what we want to hear. I've been acknowledged for my “unbridled optimism” in many settings- whether at work or around friends, but the fate of the Earth is one scenario where I can’t realistically see the glass half full. I see deforestation, greed, pollution, globalization and overpopulation. And being stepped on by all those things are a little team of whole-hearted environmentalists being called “watermelons” –green on the outside, red on the inside.

I’m consistently frustrated to see groups of healthy, empowered communities taking action against corporate greed getting combated by overweight men with self-appointed authority. What are these WASPs trying to protect? Chemically-laden frappacinos? Petroleum-dependent automobiles? The “freedom” to purchase a phone that is designed to wear out in less than two years? Surely these things are worth fighting for…or else we’d all be growing organic vegetables in our yard, walking our kids to school and sharing stories under the stars instead of sitting on the couch staring at our electric light box. How dare these hippy environmentalists try to make us convert to using renewable resources!

Satire aside, I decided right there, while watching Merchants of Doubt that it’s about time for us environmentalists to shift our attitude toward climate change. No, I don’t think we should throw in the towel and use up all the resources we can before we annihilate ourselves. I think we should start preparing for impending disaster.

Google Search: Environmental Apocalypse

What I've concluded from This Changes Everything and Merchants of Doubt is that people like me are reading these things and thinking, “hell yeah!” but those deniers they highlight are just getting stronger. In both pieces, they bring up the fact that people don’t want to feel that their ideals are being threatened, or be regulated by the government. The more I thought about that last one, I started to think of it like managing traffic. In a small town, you can have stop signs to regulate traffic flow. As an area gets more congested, just as our earth is getting more damaged, imbalanced and polluted, you have to put in traffic lights. Everyone is taught what a traffic light means, and everyone is expected to follow the rules. You don’t have to, but you will risk getting a ticket, or worse…injuring yourself or someone innocent. These are basic regulations put in place to keep us all safe, even though following traffic lights may make us feel like lab rats. If we chose not to abide by traffic lights, a huge accident could occur, and that’s when fire departments, police departments and the like have to come in. Similarly, if we continue to neglect the damage we’re doing…we’re all going to be living in FEMA camps and eating bland fortified foods. All because we’re standing on the street arguing whether or not to put in a traffic light.

I have often contemplated where to focus my energies toward our Earth. Is it really going to make a difference for me to bring my own water bottles, conserve energy around the house and bike around town, if millions of other people aren't doing that. Should I invest in educating those millions? (Well, that’s what I’m trying to do with this blog, and being an environmental educator, but as I’ve probably mentioned before, it’s a depressingly slow endeavor). What’s the use when there are still losing swaths of forests the size of Panama annually, and influencing extinction rates 1,000 fold. But there’s another idea. Something I’ve thought before but haven’t been inspired to act upon until now. I can invest in learning as much as I can about how to survive without these systems we have become dependent upon, like electricity, and coal, and gasoline.

I walked out of the theatre with a new sense of importance, and a slight sense of guilt. I had previously made a goal to have at least an annual salary worth of money in the bank by the end of the year—a goal that I’m quite close to reaching. But what use is that money if we don’t have those systems? I’ve hesitated because of the ‘post-acopolyptic crazy’ feel of it, but my big revelation is that by spending that money on learning to grow food, to utilize invasive, and use a weapon, and play drums (you never know), I’m not only building skills for a potential apocalypse, I’m building my community and myself.