It's Earth Overshoot Day, 2020!!!

“All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.” The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.

1972 was the year the Clean Water Act amendments became law. In anticipation of their enactment, Massachusetts had been engaged in a pilot study with the USACE looking at how areawide water quality management plans, as called for by Section 208 of that act, could appropriately be implemented. The United States has yet to meet the water quality goals called for in the act, despite massive expenditures of public dollars to collect and treat urban and industrial wastewater. Little has been done to address agricultural water pollution. Neither has much been done to respond to the issues and challenges identified in the 1972 report: Limits To Growth.

Blue Marble,
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Although I once debated, on MIT radio, Dennis Meadows, one of authors of that report, it would be presumptuous of me to attempt to summarize the report here, Instead, I offer the following excerpts from: The History of The Limits to Growth

A pioneering report, The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, marked a turning point in thinking about the environment, selling some 30 million copies in 30 languages.¹ The two-year study behind the report took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the request of the Club of Rome, an international group of distinguished business people, state officials, and scientists founded by Aurelio Peccei, a former Fiat executive and president of Olivetti.

What have Western societies been doing in the thirty-five years since the appearance of LtG and similar warnings from the same period?^17,18 When it comes to taking serious action, little has been done to reach a sustainable form of development, with the exception of some modest technical adjustments. On the other factors, such as population, consumption, and production, the political steps taken have generally been in the opposite direction from sustainability, and they have more than offset any benefits of technical progress. The result is that global environmental pressure, as for example indicated by humanity’s ecological footprint,¹⁹ is today much worse. And there are few signs of significant action toward changing this trend.

A sustainable future is not a matter of technology alone, partly because of the rebound effect.³³ It must build on new ways to live and organize societies, for instance recognizing that today “corporations have even less incentive than individuals to keep the Commons in order; in fact they have a (legal) clear line of responsibility to their shareholders alone and have continuously resisted government and international efforts to regulate the Commons.”³⁴ This is referring to G. Hardin’s classical paper on the problems of sharing the limited capacity of the Commons.³⁵ Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her analysis of economic governance, and especially of the commons, that understands this conundrum. She shared the prize with Oliver A. Williamson, who was lauded for his analysis of economic governance, especially in regard to the boundaries of the modern corporation.³⁶ Both study how individuals can work together and share scarce resources, an ethos shared by the authors of LtG.³⁷

So, here we are on Earth Overshoot Day, 2020. We are living in a world faced with

• climate breakdown, and all that brings with it
• a sixth extinction, and breakdown of the ecosystems on which we depend for clean air and water
• a pandemic disrupting global economies, with the prospect of more pandemics on the horizon
• no quick solutions in sight to any of the above
• several long-standing democracies faced with economic and/or civic collapse

It looks more and more as if Western knowledge and economics alone isn't sufficient to motivate us to change our ways enough to save ourselves from each other. It's encouraging that some communities are adapting Doughnut Economics to a local scale. Personally, I believe we'd all be better off, as, certainly, would any descendants we have, if we also adopted and adapted to Traditional Ecological Knowledge.

A Map to the Next World

By Joy Harjo

           for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

 

 

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Please be kind to each other while you can.