Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (6 page)

Imagine a pond with one lotus atop a lily pad. Imagine that the lilies double daily. Day 2 there are two lily pads. Day 3 there are four. Day 4 there are eight. Say the pond will fill with lotuses atop lily pads by day 30. It's not until day 27 that the pond is just one-eighth full, a lovely lotus patch at the edge. Day 28 the pond is 25 percent covered. Next day it's 50 percent covered. Only half? Day 30 it's full. Growth creeps until it goes exponential. By the time we wake up, it's too late.

Exponential growth is great for your money. Not so great for finite systems. Like the earth.

We've seen these exponential growth curves for CO
2
in the atmosphere. And for population. Benign in the beginning. Devastating left unattended. Even though I had lived as low impact a life as you can imagine, just by inaction I had been complicit with these rising curves. I could see that by minding my own business I'd let these curves climb from yellow to orange to red alert through mere inattention. This dropped me back into the real world with a resounding thud.

Overshoot and Collapse

Day 30 the pond hits lily-carrying capacity, the term for the natural-resource limit for any species.

Day 31 the pond goes from lily-carrying capacity to lily overshoot. From growing freely, they hit a wall, crowd one another out, and collapse the system on which they depend.

Ecologists use this term—overshoot and collapse—to describe a condition in natural systems when one species, for whatever reason, takes advantage of an abundant food source, multiplies, eats through the supply, and then dies off.

You could say terminal cancer is a good example of exponential growth, overshoot, and collapse. Rogue cells grow and die in our bodies all the time, but for some reason—stress, diet, heredity, habits, toxins, bad luck—our resistance might be weakened, allowing that little cancer posse to grow. From the cancer's point of view, the body itself is a fantastic food source. Unchecked, the happily multiplying cells eventually take over a vital organ, causing the whole system to collapse, killing the cancer along with the body.

Overshoot and collapse is also the classic boom-and-bust business cycle, like the tech bubble or the housing bubble, where prices skyrocket beyond the underlying value of the commodity until the house of cards tumbles. Bankruptcy is another example, where the level of debt outstrips the ability to earn enough to pay the bills. You overshoot your personal financial means. Collapse is the outcome of overshoot.

Humanity sent the earth into ecological overshoot in 1986, according to the estimates of the Ecological Footprint, a very complex calculation of resource use based on the very simple idea that our consumption—from food to energy to furniture to housing—uses a measurable amount of “planet”: water, land, animals, vegetables, minerals, materials. Your sofa, for example, has wood, cotton, perhaps brass tacks. All those can be weighed to determine the bit of the planet that is now embodied in this piece of furniture. Everything in your house can similarly be weighed. And in your driveway. And on your street. Everything counts—and can be counted by weight.

Since 1986 we have been using more planet each year than can be regenerated. We are overdrawing our ecological bank account, and going ever deeper into eco-debt. We have only one planet, so eventually this debt will crash systems. Which, as we've seen, is exactly what is slowly happening.

Limits to Growth

A team of brilliant young systems experts at MIT first sighted the shoals of human overshoot fifteen years earlier, in 1974. Their telescope, as crude as Galileo's, was a computer simulation of resource flows. Their data suggested that right about now our environmental ship would start scraping the bottom, and by midcentury our great growth economy enterprise would scrape the ground. The prestigious Club of Rome published their results as a book,
The Limits to Growth
. But no one believed their data. When we went into overshoot, few believed it. As George Bernard Shaw said, “It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.” Clearly none of us has been very smart—we believe our senses, not predictions of what will happen decades hence.

Many great minds have offered explanations for why, in the face of the data, we have failed to act, but the fact is, we have lived out what Lao-Tzu observed centuries ago: “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

To learn, in one weekend, about the titanic forces of exponential growth, overshoot and collapse, and the limits to growth was both terrifying and motivating. I saw the stark implications: our consumerist way of life was hitting the hard wall of planetary limits. In fact, we had already sailed off the cliff and were in free fall—we just thought we were flying. When I took my road less traveled I left the insanity behind, but these global problems affected everyone. There was no longer an egress—we were in this together.

True to boomer form, though, I also believed we could turn this tide, could lay new tracks to divert the runaway train.
We
can change the world if
we
can get
everyone
to do
the one thing
that would make all the difference. I believed this was the task of our generation, and failure was not an option. Drew Dellinger, in his poem “Hieroglyphic Stairway,” asks:

It's 3:23 in the morning

and I'm awake

because my great great grandchildren

won't let me sleep

my great great grandchildren

ask me in dreams

what did you do while the planet was plundered?

what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

Because I had learned how to live frugally and joyfully on far less money than most thought possible—and because for ten years we had given seminars on our approach to money to thousands of people who reported a similar felicitous result (spending far less—on average, 20 percent less—and liking their lives better), I determined we'd get “everyone” to adopt this program.

The book I wrote with Joe Dominguez,
Your Money or Your Life,
came right out of that shock and determination. It became a major best seller and catapulted me from obscurity into the limelight! I truly believed that by the turn of the millennium we would have turned the tide of overconsumption.

For a decade, my coauthor and sidekick, Joe Dominguez, our equally committed team of friends, and I gave it our all. Even after Joe's death in 1997, the team soldiered on.

But the millennium arrived and the tide had not turned. Savings were down, debt was up, overshoot marched on. The only tide that had turned was an inner one. No longer able to pretend that I or even my generation would “fix” overshoot, I swung into the waiting arms of despair. We'd failed and were careening toward the wall, the fixed limits of ecological capacity.

For three years I kept going, though, like a bear keeps running after being mortally wounded. I tried new approaches to large-scale change. Some friends and I started the Conversation Cafés in Seattle. They eventually spread around the world. I helped bring forth the Pachamama Awakening the Dreamer Symposium. I wrote a book—not yet published—on rethinking freedom in a world with limits.

Cancer's Gift: Stop, Look, Listen

I needed to stop and face the limits to what one little human can do. It took a diagnosis, in 2004, of stage 3 colon cancer to do it for me.

It reined me in, slowed me down, and placed my attention in the present moment. Once again, after a decade of traveling, speaking, organizing, and mobilizing, I turned inward.

I actually did not have a will to live. I had a will to be alive, to experience my life again rather than fight to save it—or the world. I left all my positions of leadership. I left a comfortable home and friends who'd cared for me and moved into a small cabin above the beach to tend my soul—alone. I called it a cyber-shack: one room on dubious pilings, with a bed, bathroom, and kitchenette, and an Internet connection for my one thin thread of connection to others. There were rickety stairs to the beach, but I was so weak I could climb them only in stages. I ventured out for treatment and then dropped even that to simply be.

I was able to engage in a minute examination of the fear and frantic efforts that had driven me off my personal overshoot cliff. It's not that I had misread the data about the global problems. Or that my strategies for change were misguided. There was, however, something debilitating about how I dived into problems as if the only way to learn to swim were by almost drowning. I had been this way for as long as I could remember.

Never Leaving Well Enough Alone

One of my earliest memories, in fact, is precisely an example of this: to make up alternative games for me and my pals to play. At the age of five, I organized a school for some neighborhood kids in my bedroom, with me as the teacher. I believe this was before I could read, but I wanted to experience “school” before I was officially able to go.

Later I organized still more kids into a theater troupe and produced several open-air shows with that captive audience called parents. At summer camp I was also a theatrical producer, as well as the sponsor of costume parades. Once I could read and write, I started a family newspaper. At thirteen I did the same for my junior high, patiently typing each issue on mimeograph paper.

In college, my itch for “something else, I know not what” latched onto a year of study abroad. I made it happen—got professors to sign off on all the courses—even though Brown had no such program.

Fast forward and I'm on the road. Then living in extreme circumstances learning to survive on the land in an intentional community. Then writing an international best seller and promoting “enoughness” around the world. Then starting the Conversation Cafés. The Center for a New American Dream. Sustainable Seattle.

I don't take no for an answer when that bugle of purpose calls. At least I didn't until cancer pulled the rug out from under it all, and I sat for half a year facing the fears that drove me.

In that quiet I learned to let go rather than just get going to change the world. In this emptying I began to fill myself with a modest but authentic sense that even though the gathering eco-storm had not abated, my job was simpler than righting the whole ship of state. I found my intuitive heart and intuitive feet, an assurance that love is sufficient and I need to go only where I am led and love who is right there in front of me—without having any idea why. The cancer abated, my energy returned, and I once more went to a conference on the “big picture,” where another “While You Were Out” slip got delivered. Peak Oil.

Peak Oil

“Peak Oil” is engineering-speak for the rising certainty that we have now burned half the available reserves of oil on the planet. The next quarter—like the Canadian tar sands—will be more difficult, risky, and expensive to extract. The last quarter we may never get to, as burning the prior quarter will surely send us into irreversible climate destabilization. Imagine our economy is a car. Even though we can still gas it up, running it drives us further toward environmental disaster. But not running it isn't an option either—our livelihoods depend on the engine's continuing to turn. To put it simply: if we step on the gas, we run out of planet. If we step on the brakes, people lose their jobs. Now what?

You will recognize this dynamic by now. Overshoot and collapse. This time for the very lifeblood of our industrial system. Oil. Stalled.

The global predicament was once more right in my face. Like a racehorse at the gate, like a bloodhound who catches a scent, everything in me wanted to race into the fray, inform and arm myself, and not take this news lying down. Yet I now knew that I had limits and that “all the king's horses and all the king's men” were not going to change what was already done. We were in the era of consequences, of adaptation. I did not know what to do. I could refrain from frantics (frightened antics) but I could not settle within. Surely something with integrity and wisdom could be done beyond mere acceptance.

Relocalization—preparing communities to thrive during the long transition from oil dependency to diverse, regional food, energy, and business systems—was the only big idea that made a little sense. But how? How to remake a ferry-dependent way of life designed around cheap oil and endless growth for its lifeblood? I could not imagine all our ferry commuters going to jobs at Boeing—one per car—squeezing back into a more rural way of life.

Partners in Caring

In 2007, I met a young couple, Britt and Eric, who also understood the gravity of the situation, the need for relocalization. They wanted to start a center where people could learn those necessary rural skills of growing food, cooking with the sun, building with mud, pacing life by the seasons. Just my kind of people, and right in time to partner on forming Transition Whidbey. In the box, you'll learn more about this approach.

Eric had inhaled with every baby breath his father's fierce desire for self-sufficiency and survivalist skills, so his young dreams were of being able to survive in the woods with nothing more than a knife. The hunter-gatherer lifestyle seemed the most natural way to live, and Eric eyed his uncle's sixty acres as a near perfect territory for a young buck to roam free. This shifted in college, though. Given that there are 7 billion people on the planet, sustainable settlements, not hunter-gatherer tribes, are the best way to collectively survive. Now his passion is for growing edibles, and he dreams of growing some portion of the many thousands of indigenous varieties. Give him a growing season and some ground and he'll be testing out crops and methods.

Britt, a wanderer and explorer, like me, has always had multiple interests, from shamanism to surfing. She met Eric in a class at Western Washington University in Bellingham—Eric was the student facilitator and Britt was the student—and felt a sense of destiny and deep love. Their vision of a sustainability center on Whidbey matched mine—and it was a concrete step we could take immediately.