Limbo
It's over a month now since I last posted an entry to this blog. I suppose that reflects being caught in a state of limbo. I've had a couple of wonderful and delightfully quirky reviews of Earthdream from members here whom I now consider to be friends. I've been convinced by them that there is a readership here for my book, albeit quite a small one. I ask a lot of the reader I think ... possibly too much? This is what I am still unsure about. Is the difficulty in the writing itself, or is it more about the unusual structure and breadth of the subject matter that makes it a tough read for a lot of people? For those who take on the challenge there does seem to be considerable reward, which encourages me to believe that this venture is worth pursuing. Actually, I can't really avoid pursuing it because I pledged to do that in the book, and too much time has already passed. I have to start honouring that contract I made!
There have been distractions too. I've been enjoying the best April weather experienced in England since records began over 300 years ago. Day after day of blue skies, not necessarily that warm at times, but remarkably dry and with long spells of virtually unbroken sunshine. This is unprecedented. April is a month of showers. There's usually one nice day at the beginning of the month and people get all excited at the prospect of summer starting early, but I always respond by saying that we'll see snow before the end of the month, and despite the scoffs I'm invariably proved correct. But not this year.
I've been getting out into the Yorkshire Dales on my bike, exploring my favourite little roads, visiting places not seen since last summer and discovering a few new ones as well. I can't remember my 'backyard' ever looking so beautiful. I've been prompted to wax lyrical about it on my more general blog with a couple of posts: Springtime Revolutions and Ton up in the Dales. The bluebells peaked so early that I missed seeing them at their best, but I tried to capture the beauty of our local ancient woodland in Maytime Miracle. The sheer fecundity of nature has been breathtaking. Global warming? Bring it on!
Living in this stunningly picturesque and immensely privileged little corner of the world it is all too easy to forget the fragility of the planetary ecosystem into which we are all connected. A small reminder of that has come about through the opposite extremes of weather that have prevailed in the US Midwest in April, which has been subject to terrible flooding and severe tornadoes, with many lives being lost. Our globe is warming, and the upshot of that increase in energy is more extreme weather. But that is really the least of it.
I'm currently reading The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, which has reopened my eyes, wider than ever before, to the scale of the problems we have created and are now facing going into the future. It is an emotionally intense read. Overwhelming on the one hand, but inspirational on the other. I've been swinging between despair and hope, one moment pessimistic, the next optimistic. That's because all the fundamental global problems we face today do actually have solutions, but they require an effort from individual people which needs to be fostered by a political will. And it is that political will which is missing - because we people of the democratic world are not collectively shouting loud enough at our political leaders to take responsibility.
In the final chapter of Earthdream (The Mythology of Survival) I concluded by writing ...
I picture the Earth as a raft, afloat in a great black sea. For too long we have hacked and torn away at the timbers of our raft to fuel our insatiable appetite for 'things'. The superstructure is breaking up. Holes are appearing. Our raft is beginning to leak. Water is coming in. We clearly need to change our pattern of living. We have to start conserving the essential timbers that form the very body of our world. That world is not infinitely exploitable. We cannot carry on destroying the fabric of our own life-support system. Now, it happens that the solution is quite straightforward, and really not that painful. We just have to accept the need to lead a simpler, more creative, less consumptive way of life. And a more committed way of life. We each need to spend just a little of our time each day baling the water out from our raft. This is our global responsibility.
But we are not yet taking this responsibility upon ourselves. We are continuing to strip the superstructure of our raft to fuel our material progress, and at an ever faster rate. And very few people are bothering to help bale. We somehow persuade ourselves that our individual effort will make so little difference as to be worthless. There is so much water, and our individual buckets are so small. Baling would be a waste of time. Wouldn't it? We decide that we have more important things to do with our time. Like watching television. And so our raft carries on letting in ever more water, through ever more holes.
The analogy is terrifyingly close to the reality. The seas are rising on us. Our great cities are threatened with a submarinal future. Does this bring us to our senses? No. We are too inured to apathy. Too entrenched in our traditional ways. Too snugly embraced in the comfort of our boredom. Too much in love with our material vanities. With the water around our feet, and rising, we are still to be found hacking and tearing away at the timbers of our raft. The very real fear is that we will awake from our insanity too late. We will open our eyes to find the water around our necks. Our raft will be sinking. Or perhaps the water will only be around our knees. The holes would still be irreparable, but we might have a chance of survival. If we wanted to survive that is. Survival on these terms wouldn't amount to a whole lot of fun. We would be required to spend the best part of each day just baling to keep the raft afloat, and you can imagine all the squabbles that would break out over that. It's a wretched prospect.
Yet, as things stand today, this is just the kind of dystopian future that we are going to be leaving for our children. I can hear their voices. Angry voices. Resentful voices. "They were insane," I hear them cry. "They knew so much; how come they understood so little, how come they had so little vision?" I hear voices of despair. "How could they have sat by and let this happen?" I hear voices of hatred. "How could they have raped their own mother?"
That was 20 years ago. Nothing has changed except that we are all now far more aware of the fact that our raft is sinking. But it's still only an abstract awareness. It's still something we choose to ignore. I've been as guilty as anyone. I've really been stuck in limbo for very much longer than just this last month.
There have been distractions too. I've been enjoying the best April weather experienced in England since records began over 300 years ago. Day after day of blue skies, not necessarily that warm at times, but remarkably dry and with long spells of virtually unbroken sunshine. This is unprecedented. April is a month of showers. There's usually one nice day at the beginning of the month and people get all excited at the prospect of summer starting early, but I always respond by saying that we'll see snow before the end of the month, and despite the scoffs I'm invariably proved correct. But not this year.
I've been getting out into the Yorkshire Dales on my bike, exploring my favourite little roads, visiting places not seen since last summer and discovering a few new ones as well. I can't remember my 'backyard' ever looking so beautiful. I've been prompted to wax lyrical about it on my more general blog with a couple of posts: Springtime Revolutions and Ton up in the Dales. The bluebells peaked so early that I missed seeing them at their best, but I tried to capture the beauty of our local ancient woodland in Maytime Miracle. The sheer fecundity of nature has been breathtaking. Global warming? Bring it on!
Living in this stunningly picturesque and immensely privileged little corner of the world it is all too easy to forget the fragility of the planetary ecosystem into which we are all connected. A small reminder of that has come about through the opposite extremes of weather that have prevailed in the US Midwest in April, which has been subject to terrible flooding and severe tornadoes, with many lives being lost. Our globe is warming, and the upshot of that increase in energy is more extreme weather. But that is really the least of it.
I'm currently reading The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, which has reopened my eyes, wider than ever before, to the scale of the problems we have created and are now facing going into the future. It is an emotionally intense read. Overwhelming on the one hand, but inspirational on the other. I've been swinging between despair and hope, one moment pessimistic, the next optimistic. That's because all the fundamental global problems we face today do actually have solutions, but they require an effort from individual people which needs to be fostered by a political will. And it is that political will which is missing - because we people of the democratic world are not collectively shouting loud enough at our political leaders to take responsibility.
In the final chapter of Earthdream (The Mythology of Survival) I concluded by writing ...
I picture the Earth as a raft, afloat in a great black sea. For too long we have hacked and torn away at the timbers of our raft to fuel our insatiable appetite for 'things'. The superstructure is breaking up. Holes are appearing. Our raft is beginning to leak. Water is coming in. We clearly need to change our pattern of living. We have to start conserving the essential timbers that form the very body of our world. That world is not infinitely exploitable. We cannot carry on destroying the fabric of our own life-support system. Now, it happens that the solution is quite straightforward, and really not that painful. We just have to accept the need to lead a simpler, more creative, less consumptive way of life. And a more committed way of life. We each need to spend just a little of our time each day baling the water out from our raft. This is our global responsibility.
But we are not yet taking this responsibility upon ourselves. We are continuing to strip the superstructure of our raft to fuel our material progress, and at an ever faster rate. And very few people are bothering to help bale. We somehow persuade ourselves that our individual effort will make so little difference as to be worthless. There is so much water, and our individual buckets are so small. Baling would be a waste of time. Wouldn't it? We decide that we have more important things to do with our time. Like watching television. And so our raft carries on letting in ever more water, through ever more holes.
The analogy is terrifyingly close to the reality. The seas are rising on us. Our great cities are threatened with a submarinal future. Does this bring us to our senses? No. We are too inured to apathy. Too entrenched in our traditional ways. Too snugly embraced in the comfort of our boredom. Too much in love with our material vanities. With the water around our feet, and rising, we are still to be found hacking and tearing away at the timbers of our raft. The very real fear is that we will awake from our insanity too late. We will open our eyes to find the water around our necks. Our raft will be sinking. Or perhaps the water will only be around our knees. The holes would still be irreparable, but we might have a chance of survival. If we wanted to survive that is. Survival on these terms wouldn't amount to a whole lot of fun. We would be required to spend the best part of each day just baling to keep the raft afloat, and you can imagine all the squabbles that would break out over that. It's a wretched prospect.
Yet, as things stand today, this is just the kind of dystopian future that we are going to be leaving for our children. I can hear their voices. Angry voices. Resentful voices. "They were insane," I hear them cry. "They knew so much; how come they understood so little, how come they had so little vision?" I hear voices of despair. "How could they have sat by and let this happen?" I hear voices of hatred. "How could they have raped their own mother?"
That was 20 years ago. Nothing has changed except that we are all now far more aware of the fact that our raft is sinking. But it's still only an abstract awareness. It's still something we choose to ignore. I've been as guilty as anyone. I've really been stuck in limbo for very much longer than just this last month.
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Thinking about what you've said there I suspect our biggest problem is that we live most of our lives in that in-between state of blurriness. Our normal depth of focus means that we miss out on both the glorious intricate detail of the world in the microcosm and the bigger meanings of the world in the macrocosm. That's one sense of being in limbo.The other, as you so rightly point out, is that we're caught between the indifference of our political institutions and the indifference of the majority of individual people. In the face of political indifference, individual action seems pointless. But without that individual action, politicians will never put policy concerned with long-term sustainability before that required to win re-election in the short-term. It's so overwhelming a problem that I fear it is only too easy to let it all blur over. But we must fight that instinct. Each of us has a responsibility to do our little bit by living more simply and raising awareness, however small and insignificant that may seem to be. That's the only way forward right now.
Earthdreaming
To have no dream is to have no vision. And to have no vision is to have no future.
- Bob Hamilton's profile
- 17 followers
Perhaps as our thoughts evolve that pertain to the way we look at the world, we must first lose focus to find focus. Like looking though a camera lens, you focus on your object only to decide it is to far away to capture completely, so you adjust. To find focus you must first pass though a state of blurriness, then on the other side of the lens suddenly you see your object more clearly than before the adjustment.
To swing passionately from one thought to it's complete opposite is as frustrating as knowing the answers but losing your voice.
I fear that we are living in a world of indifference and for those who do care, the indifference forces us between worlds, a constant state of limbo, or perhaps it is the people with power who are in limbo and with their indifference our strength gives way to lost hope and in turn we also cast ourselves into our own state of perpetual indifference.