Why screw sustainability?

Because the word implies merely hanging in there, merely surviving, merely sustaining. It implies a penny-pinching earth, a miserly existence, a nature that punishes change, and a nature that prefers small tribes to large groups of human beings.

This sort of attitude has traditionally led to ignorance and to self-inflicted poverty. It pitched Europe into misery from the fall of Rome in 476 ad to the revival of optimism, technology, and entrepreneurialism in 1100 ad. That 600-year-long slump was the famous dark ages of the West. An attitude of self-denial and an urge to return to the past also led to an age of darkness in the Islamic Empire starting in 1566. For the first time, Islam saw its limitations more clearly than it saw its possibilities. How did it respond? It banned every new technology, shunned every new idea, and withdrew into fantasies of a past mistakenly viewed as a paradise.

This sustainability-style-thinking was responsible for the impoverishment of North Africa and of the Middle East that goes on to this day. Which gives you an idea of the power of worldviews.

How potent is that power? Aztec kings 500 years ago climbed to the sacred rooms at the top of their pyramids, slit their arms, and sacrificed their blood to the sun. Aztec PRIESTS ordered guards to drag up to 8,000 captives a day to the upper steps of their pyramids. The priests sawed open the chest of each victim with an obsidian knife, reached in between the ribs while the victim was still alive, pulled out the heart, held that frantically-beating pump up to the sun, then rolled the victim down the pyramid’s steps as meat for the feasts of the worshippers down below.

Aztec priests and kings didn’t do these things out of cruelty. They did them to save humanity. They did them to guarantee that the sun would rise the next morning. In the Aztec worldview, the sun was skinned alive and went down in blood every single night. You could see that blood in the red that filled the basin of the sky. It would take the blood of human beings to give the sun the strength to rise. For victims and for victors, the Aztec worldview made the difference between death and life.

Then there’s the case of the Tasmanians off the coast of Australia. For roughly 4,000 years, Tasmanian mothers, fathers, and children starved to death every time a famine struck. They starved and died despite the fact that they lived on an island surrounded by seas that were rich in gourmet delicacies, those swimming, diving fillets called fish.

So why did the Tasmanians die without a bite to eat? In the Tasmanian worldview, the creatures of the sea were what cockroaches are to you and me. They weren’t food. They weren’t fit to eat. Once again, life and death depended on how you see.

Sustainability implies a worldview of a kindly and caring nature, a nature that’s easily raped by technology, industry, capitalism, and modernism. It implies a nature that will automatically protect rainforests, whales, and endangered species if we greedy modern humans rein in our consumerist lusts. If we get rid of our SUVs and of our industrial factories, this worldview tells us that nature will go back to the greenery and the reliability of some mythic good old days.

But that view of nature isn’t true. Nature is not the motherly protector. Nature is just the opposite. She tosses us curves and challenges our creativity. The challenge to create is what Mother Nature and her favorite game — evolution — are really all about. Which means we need a major worldview change.

Mother Nature does not build everlasting Edens for the eco-conscious. Mother Nature is the mother of catastrophe. She’s tossed her children a major die off every 26 million years or so, a total of 148 major die offs that we’ve been able to count. She’s shocked this planet with six far bigger mass extinctions, six enormous holocausts of species. Those die-offs haven’t come from smokestack factories, consumerism, and the depredations of capitalism. They’ve come from the natural evolution of the earth that gave us life. And their message has been simple. Ride the waves of change or die.

Mother Nature challenges our ability to surf the waves of change when she slings us through a 240-million-year-long-orbit around the center of our galaxy, an orbit that takes us through interstellar gas clusters called local fluff, interstellar clusters that strip our planet of its protective heliosphere, interstellar clusters that bombard the earth with cosmic radiation and interstellar clusters that trigger giant climate change. Just one of those changes could wipe our civilization … and even the human race … away.

Nature challenges our creativity with a wildly bouncing atmosphere. The CO2 level 1.4 billion years ago was at least ten to 200 times greater than it is today, ten to 200 times greater than it’s projected to be a few decades down the line even if we continue to spew the emissions produced by our hyper-industrial economy.

When CO2 levels shoot that high again — and they will someday with us or without us — they’ll melt this planet’s ice, submerge our cities, turn our grain belts into swamps, and might well poison us with the few last breaths we’re able to take. They’ll do all this despite Kyoto Treaties and despite every reduction of human CO2 output we can make.

Nature challenges our creativity with an outer atmosphere that gathers nearly 30 million kilograms of space dust a year. She challenges us by sending us through a cloud of interplanetary powder that doubles or even triples this tonnage of cosmic dust in our outer atmosphere every 100,000 years. The darkness and cold this dust produces could make the old nightmare of a nuclear winter look like a sunny day in spring.

Nature challenges our adaptability with her taste for far smaller flicks of her weather whip. In the last 120,000 years there were 20 interludes in which the temperature of the planet shot up 10 to 18 degrees within a decade. What’s more, until just 10,000 years ago, the Gulf Stream shifted its route every 1,500 years or so. It stopped heading North to Iceland and instead targeted Europe’s coast, licking the old continent with unaccustomed warmth. Another fickle climate twitch of this sort would melt mega-islands of ice, put out our coastal cities beneath the surface of the sea, and strip our farmlands of the conditions they need to produce the food that feeds us.

Then there’s mother nature’s opposite trick—Ice Ages, roughly 80 of them, from the days 2.2 billion years ago when the planet was an iceball to a mere 12,000 years ago, when Nature quieted briefly and gave our species a short breathing space. But that breathing space is very short indeed!!

Are there any hints about what Mother Nature demands from us if we want to survive? Yes, many of them.

First of all, Mother Nature’s catastrophes and the challenges they’ve tossed us made us what we are today. We were born as one of the most helpless and pathetic species this planet has ever seen. We were hairless and couldn’t handle the cold of winter and the summer heat. Furry species like mastodons, saber-toothed cats, and modern dogs and rabbits could take the winter cold in stride. But when we are naked, we simply can’t.

What’s worse, we have no fangs and no claws — things eagles and lions take for granted. When we first evolved, we were hungry for meat, but we couldn’t tear prey animals apart with our fingernails. And our running is horribly slow. Even cockroaches and mice can sprint faster than we can. So hunting down meat was something we were born WITHOUT the tools to do.

Yet we made it through 20 Ice Ages. And we did it living on the most challenging place of all -- the very edge of the glaciers that were freezing nearly everything in sight. What’s more, we pulled this off while gorging ourselves on meat. How the hell did we manage it? By taking disaster as a challenge, then mastering it. By defying Mother Nature and flinging her capriciousness back in her face.

We made new fangs and new claws out of stone. We flaked axes, choppers, blades, scrapers, spear tips, and much later, arrowheads. We made our own fur coats out of the skins of the beasts we hunted down. Our fingers were too weak to dig dens, so we built tents out of mammoth tusks and mammoth ribs then covered them with mammoth skins.

We did these things because we refused to shut down in the face of disaster.

We did these things because we refused to adopt sustainability’s implied strategy, the strategy of retreat. We took cataclysms as a challenge and as an opportunity. We invented new ways to make tools, new ways to make wealth, and new ways to celebrate.

We invented makeup, art, beads, and fishing hooks. We invented handles for stone tools. We invented calendars and carved them into pieces of deer antler to keep track of the seasons. We invented cave art, sculpture, and music. We did all of these things during an unstoppable Ice Age.

We did all of these things in spite of Mother Nature.

We did all of these things because we chose light over Nature’s darkness. We chose enthusiasm over gloom. We chose to make an exuberant new future rather than to hide in a puritanical past. Thanks to our audacious acts of defiance, Mother Nature’s cruelty and her disasters made us human!

Every article like this needs a take-home message so before I conclude this part I will give you one:

Mother Nature is a vicious bitch.

Catastrophe is her stock in trade and, with our help or without it, Mother Nature will sooner or later yank everything we take for granted away. Unless we lay the foundations for a technology and for a civilization able to harness the energies and surmount the floods and freezes of change.

That's what we're going to talk about next time, in Screw 'Sustainability - And Cheer Up About It.

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