“That that is, is.” — Shakespeare, Twelfth Night.
Here is one way of looking at our current predicament: We all live in two “worlds” simultaneously, both of which we depend on completely — but which are fundamentally incompatible with one another. By “worlds” I refer to self-organizing complex adaptive systems. These I call “Glomart” and “Gaia.” The first is my own neologism; the second, James Lovelock’s deliberate and artful recycling of an ancient Greek mythic name of the primordial Earth Mother Goddess as a metaphor for our current understanding of the biosphere itself as a deeply interconnected, evolving, self-organizing complex adaptive system.
Putting it quite simply, Glomart (short for “Global Market Economy”) is the Order of Money; Gaia is the Order of Nature. We depend entirely on Glomart for our livelihoods, our property, our security, our transportation, our entertainment, and our everyday needs and wants. We depend on Gaia, however, for the oxygenated air we breathe, the fresh water we drink, the fertility of the topsoil that grows our food, the marine ecosystems that provide our fish, the wilderness that maintains genetic diversity in plants, animals, and fungi, and our own physical and emotional health. So Glomart is our economic support system; Gaia is our biological support system. Without either of them, we would die. Glomart is the world we have made; Gaia is the world that made us, and still keeps us alive, with every breath, sip, and bite.
There is one huge problem, however: the production rules of Glomart are diametrically opposed to the production rules of Gaia. So Glomart has become a parasite on its own biological support system, a cancer on Gaia, the living Earth. Here are those production rules, compared:
1. Glomart: More is always better. / Gaia: Enough is enough. Our entire global market economy operates on a logic of maximization (which we call “Economic Growth”) which is implicit in the money system, since money is only arithmetic. Whereas our living planet operates on a logic of optimization, where too much or too little of anything is toxic to the system. If we eat too much we die; if we eat too little, we die. Likewise, if we get too little rain, crops wither and ecosystems collapse; if we get too much rain, floods wash away topsoil and everything else, and…communities and agricultural systems also collapse. And so on for everything else — too much or too little of anything is destructive — including (and especially) money.
2. Glomart: You are what you own. / Gaia: you are what you do. Glomart is a culture of consumerism — where getting and spending is all that matters, so that we are defined by our bank accounts and our toys. Whereas, in the natural world — i.e. — the real world, both human and nonhuman, what we are is defined by what we do to sustain the systems that in turn sustain us. Tigers hunt, birds fly, mushrooms decompose, and in indigenous communities throughout the world, people are defined by the skills and services they provide to their community — not by how many toys they own.
3. Glomart: Nothing has value until it has a price. / Gaia: value is incalculable because it is inherent in interconnectedness. A simple example of the above rule is a tree, which is worthless to Glomart until it is cut down and turned into board feet, to generate capital for the owners of the corporation who own or lease the land, to pay the salaries of the workers who destroy the trees. However, in a living forest, a tree serves all manner of beneficial functions based on its interconnections with all the life around it and beneath the soil: as habitat for a huge array of creatures; as shade in heat and shelter in cold; as evapotranspiration to seed cloud cover and regulate the climate, etc. Glomart depends on turning nature into commodities, but to commodify something, we need to draw a boundary around it to isolate it from its context. Gaia, conversely, depends entirely on the complex interconnectedness of its component organisms — plants, animals, fungi, and microbes — to create and sustain its own contexts for regeneration and evolution.
4. Glomart: The Bottom Line is the bottom line. / Gaia: the only “bottom line” is the health, competence, and resilience of life itself, from one generation to the next. Corporations — the dominant species of Glomart — are designed and even licensed for only one purpose: to maximize the profits of their shareholders, by any means necessary. Some of these means, of course, are socially adaptive — creating employment, designing new products, promoting innovation, etc. But many of these means are obviously socially maladaptive as well: steady upward concentration of wealth, exploitation of labor (the “race to the bottom”), deceptive advertising, corruption of legislators, externalization of the costs of doing business (i.e. pollution) and ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuels for the energy they need to grow — hence suppression of public information about the devastating effects they are having on Gaia’s climate, biodiversity, and ecological health. In short, Glomart has become a cancer on Gaia, and now that cancer has gone terminal.
So what can we do about this? Are we irrevocably doomed?
Well — yes and no. Terminal cancer has two possible outcomes: death or spontaneous remission. The first is by far the most probable, but the second, while extremely rare, remains a possibility; it has been attested in medical studies and reports, but researchers as yet have no idea how it happens.
Our global market economy (Glomart) is doomed, whether we like it or not, because it depends entirely on dense and cheap energy from fossil fuels and on money: an arbitrary transform of information about the relative value of commodities. But money is ultimately an abstraction — it is just arithmetic. And in any unregulated market economy (and no one regulates the entire planet!) whose available reservoir of net energy (fossil fuels) is steadily depleted (and thus requiring ever more energy to extract), even while it is destroying our biological support systems, money concentrates steadily and irreversibly into ever fewer hands, gradually culminating in an oligarchy of four tiers: the Owners (who own everything), the Consumers ( folks who work for the owners and buy their products — like most of us here, with our cars, computers, and other tools or toys); the working poor ( who must do anything under any conditions, merely to survive), and the marginalized Others (ethnic minorities, the unsheltered, prisoners, etc.) whom the owners encourage all the rest of us to despise, and ultimately to exterminate, by neglect and abandonment, if nothing else.
So again, what can we do? Collectively, probably nothing; the Owners now hold all the cards — all the money and power and influence. But individually, we still have options. These fall under three broad categories: Good Buy, Good Work, and Good Will.
Good Buy means assuming responsibility — to the extent we can — for the social and ecological consequences of every dollar we spend or invest, since money itself is a transform of information about what we value. So before we buy anything, we can ask ourselves three questions: (1) Where is the money for this item going? (2) Do I really need it? Is it a tool or an addiction? (3) What happens to it after I’m done with it. Can it be reused or recycled? Applying these questions to every purchase we make will subtly undermine Glomart, since it is a system whose life blood is money, and that money ultimately comes from the value-based decisions each of us makes. So make a habit, whenever possible, of buying local, buying organic, and reducing, reusing, and recycling everything we can. And pass it on.
Good Work is right livelihood; it entails understanding the difference between work and slavery. My own definition of “good work” is work that promotes the health, competence, and resilience of myself, my communities, my bioregion, and our living planet simultaneously. This translates into learning, teaching, healing, and creating — the four things worth doing with our lives. Slavery, by contrast, is “working for the Man.” That means enslaving yourself, in return for a wage or salary, to serve the interests of others who will make far more money from what you do than you will, and who can fire you whenever they wish. So my favorite slogan for good work is “Grow gardens, Grow community, and Grow awareness.”
Good Will is, above all, cultivating the values of benevolence, compassion, the ability to smile, and equanimity in all you do, every day, while focusing on your breathing, when necessary, to resist taking any action at all when momentarily triggered by rage, resentment, fear, or hatred. As a wise Tibetan saying puts it “Meditate on whatever makes you burn inwardly.” But be sure to know the difference between brooding (which only feeds the flames) and meditating (breathing, observing, and letting go) which lets the flames die down, so you don’t act on destructive or dysfunctional emotions or obsessions.
It all amounts to assuming responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of every decision we make: what to buy, how we make our living, and how we treat others (human and nonhuman) and how we take care of our living planet. In this way, we can move incrementally toward a symbiotic, rather than parasitic, relationship toward others and toward our biological support system — the only life-sustaining planet we will ever know. So no matter what happens — to our nation and our planet alike — join me in growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness, starting today!