What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire Page #7

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billion down toward one billion.

If we decide we want to reduce it we can

see to it that the reduction occurs

in a more humane way than it will occur if we

just try to keep on business as usual.

Humanity has never been in this. This is

new. This is new. And this is big.

And this is not being talked about.

And because it is not being talked about,

we have no clear idea how we might

device that softer landing.

Talking about it, then, clearly

and honestly, is the first step.

Without that, catastrophe

is inevitable. But either way,

Our global population is going to be reduced.

this is what I had to face.: the population

of my species is going to be reduced.

I had to face it just like the grizzly

bears have had to face it, and the

wild salmon have had to face it,

just like the right whales and the piping plovers

and the mountain gorillas have had to face it,

just like the great auks and the golden

toads and the blackfin cisco had to

face it before they went extinct.

And I had to face something else.:

I have a choice about how I meet it.

My friend Lyle gave it some perspective.

The fact is that there have been die-offs

of civilizations. There have been

collapses of great, mighty civilizations.

Sophisticated, powerful, unbelievable

civilizations have collapsed.

And it's a choice.

it's a choice that we can decide to succeed

or fail. And i'm going to go ahead and

decide to succeed, thank you

And i'd really like it if you'd come with me.

What choices do we now have? What would

that success Lyle speaks of look like?

What is inevitable at this point? And

what remains to be created, if only we

awaken to our power?

Most importantly, why have we

not already awakened?

And you know something? The more

you talk about your problems the

easier they are to solve.

This bottling things up inside is bad!

We can't survive apart from the earth.

And so. . . we're killing it!

i think part of looking at things exactly

the way they are is feeling how isolated

and alienated we have become from ourselves,

from the people around us,

and from the natural world.

And when you look at that, and experience

that, the natural response is deep grief.

Deep grief at the loss of connection.

There are other issues we could have looked at.

How do we face into all of this information?

It looks as though our very survival

as a species is now in question.

As I gaze unflinchingly at the world situation,

the information goes right into my body.

I feel shaken to the core.

I feel like running away.

I feel, at times, like I've been hit head on.

I know I'm not alone.

I wish I had some magic potion.

I wish I had some easy fix.

I wish I could just tell you that

everything is going to be OK.

But of course I can't tell you that.

And probably, deep down,

you already know that.

What chance do I really have, doctor?

Mr. Marshall, I have no desire to mislead you.

I'm sure you realize that

recovery is not a sure thing.

Thirty-six years after the first Earth Day,

forty-four years after Silent Spring,

the planet is closer now to ecological

meltdown than it has ever been.

If what we want is to stop the destruction

of the life of this planet, then what

we have been doing has not been working.

We will have to do something else.

When we stay focused on

the question, "what do we do?"

we don't ask the more basic

questions about "how did we get here?"

And if we don't ask those questions i don't

think we've got much chance of effecting

the kind of radical change that we're going to

have to effect if we're going to make it.

Well, i appreciate your being so

frank with me, Dr Swenson.

I guess I don't have to tell you how i feel.

From my experience, talking about how

we feel is exactly what we need to be doing.

And we'll also need to

question some assumptions.

One assumption I question is the one

that tells us that, since scientists can

help us understand the situation,

they are automatically equipped

to tell us how to "solve" it.

But there are forces at work in the world that

cannot be understood through a microscope.

What are the forces that brought us

to this point? And what are the

forces that keep us stuck here?

I went to speak with the people who are

trying to answer these questions.

I realized that I would have to step

outside of the culture, so that I could

see it from a new perspective.

Deep inside the tangle of problems that

threatens the entire world there rages a

boundless blaze of cultural fire,

the locomotive power for the

cultural train we're all now riding.:

an engine not of steam or diesel, but of

story, and myth, habit and belief.

An engine racing out of control.

It's time to look more closely

at the culture of Empire.

So, how did we get into this mess?

wow. That's a cosmic question.

Many analysts think it started about ten

thousand years ago when humans began to

engage in a new and fundamentally

unsustainable style of food production.

What we invented was something

that I call totalitarian agriculture,

which is predicated on the

notion that it all belongs to us.

We can kill off anything we don't want on

the land, put a fence around the land.

We can grow the food we want on

the land and Nobody else can touch it.

That slippery slope that we're on right now. . . we

started walking on that ten thousand years ago.

And it is because of an inherent

problem in "agriculture". "Agriculture"

really depends on disturbance.

There's no way you can do "agriculture"

without doing that catastrophic damage.

So it makes "agriculture"

fundamentally unsustainable.

The surplus from this new way

of getting food had immediate effects.

It has fueled this tremendous

population growth of ours.

Our growing population is always

catching up with our food production.

We have a food race on our hands.

We grow more food and the population

increases. So we grow more food.

It's a race that can't be won.

On top of that, totalitarian agriculture

also consigned its practitioners to

a life of hard work and poor health.

As a species, we had food before us for

all of our history, which is two hundred. . .

three hundred thousand years.

When you look at ten thousand years

it's relatively minor in that space.

But we were hunter-gatherers.

So nature grew our food in its way. As

opposed to our way, which is "agriculture".

We didn't grow food. Food grew.

it's hard for people to accept the fact that

the more you base your society

on agriculture, the harder you work.

if we look at archaeological sites around

the world - and people have done this -

in all the locations - this is not a cultural issue -

in all the locations where agriculture

began, in Asia, the Mid-East, South

America, and Central America,

we will find people why are stunted, short,

their teeth are invariable gone because of the

carbohydrates they're eating turn into sugars

and rot their teeth out,

they're misshapen, they're asymmetrical,

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