I am moved by the way Mother Nature demonstrates her power. Her relentless hurricanes laughing through our lousy infrastructure, her arctic glaciers melting as if to a conductor’s cue, her sultry wildfires licking at million-dollar timeshare homes like an infected wound. What happens when the West steals everything from the rest of the world but it still isn’t enough?
Cognitively we understand that we face the annihilation of our species, as reflected in the frantic way scientists research to confirm what indigenous societies already know. Somatically, however, we have yet to move through our emotions about this. No amount of data collection, fancy graphical reports, IPCC or UN meetings, or political demonstrations will correct our collective motherfucking of the Earth.
We cannot innovate our way out of this shit. Our technocorporate masters have deluded us into thinking everything, including our agency, can be bought and sold. As a farmer, I cannot see how corporate AI and robot farms can solve soil degradation and an impending water crisis. Without understanding that capitalism is enmeshed with racism, patriarchy, and narcissism, we continue to be complicit in a technoscientific need for control, manipulation, and domination over nature. Optimizing this abuse will only accelerate our demise; there is no way out of the pain, we must move through it.
Spirituality is the greatest threat to authoritarianism, and this is precisely why it has been excised from government. By this I do not mean organized religion, but our individual manifestation of the collective consciousness, which at this point is our only true freedom. The solution to climate change is profound both in its simplicity and difficulty. It requires each of us to find the humility to repair our relationship with nature, which means decolonizing, reindigenizing, and healing the wounds within ourselves so we do not perpetuate the violence of colonization.
“In our economic systems, the ecological systems are zero. It’s only the products which we extract which are given value. This is fundamentally wrong. So we have a fundamental error in logic at the basis of global economics.” -John D. Liu