Climate: A New Story with Charles Eisenstein (2020)

"We MUST want to rethink how we really live"
Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann

What world do we want to live in?

That' the question.

Not "Can we survive and

can we continue to grow the economy?"

What if we could sustain

business as usual

What if we could install, you know

carbon sucking machines and

bleach the sky with sulfur aerosols

to maintain constant temperatures

and continue to ruin life on earth

until we have a concrete world

with hydroponic factories,

synthetic food and

digital VR displays

of all the nature that's been lost

And rising GDP of the whole time

what if we could do that

Do we want to do that?

The geomechanical view is basically

understands Earth as a complicated machine

So it's like a diesel engine

If the air fuel mixture is wrong

then the engine won't perform well

So if levels of greenhouse gases are too high

then the planet is not going to perform well

Earth as a living being

Whereas if we understand Earth is a
living being

then we might say okay

what will make the planet more resilient

to higher levels of greenhouse gases

because I think that if we

cut greenhouse gases to zero

even if we did that overnight

if we continue to degrade the organs

and tissues of this living being

then the planet will die of organ failure

even if carbon dioxide emissions are

reduced to zero

because this is not a machine

CLIMATE A NEW STORY

I'm advocating that we

reformulate our basic environmental narratives

so and especially the climate narrative

so that it comes from the understanding

that Earth is a living being

and not a complicated machine

The living planet view is familiar

to a lot of people

because of Gaia theory

that essentially says Earth, if not live, is

like a living being

it maintains homeostasis

it has many qualities of life

Most scientists would not say

that it's actually alive

but I think we need to go

to the place of relating to earth

as a living being

and even a sacred being

PLANETARY HEALTH

So we have a planet that is severely degraded

the rainforests, the mangrove swamps

the wetlands, the kelp forests

the seagrass meadows,

the water, the soil

all of these are at a a fraction of their

former level of vitality and health

which means that

this earth is much less able

to maintain

a stable climate

and to deal with whatever challenges and fluctuations

happen whether it's human emissions

CO2 emissions or

volcanic emissions or whatever

fluctuations in the Sun

the planet is much less able to be resilient

when its organs are so degraded

so that means that

if we hadn't reduced

our tree count to half

of what used to be

if we hadn't turned

vast areas of every continent into deserts

I don't think that 400 ppm would be a problem

but in fact

we've done the opposite

we've made life so so much less able

to handle challenges

that greenhouse gases, I think,

are a serious threat they're very destabilizing

and that's a different view

than the standard global warming

runaway global warming narrative

but it's not entirely contradictory to it either

the production of fossil fuels

also does damage in other ways

that I think ultimately from

the Living Planet View might even be more damaging

the way that it destroys whole ecosystems

I mean you've seen probably the photographs of the

Alberta tar sands

and just the ruin caused

by the more mountain top removal, you know

or the oil spills

when we understand Earth as alive

I mean imagine like that's happening to the cells

and tissues in your body

like whole swaths of them

are getting poisoned and destroyed

then how are you going to maintain

a healthy body temperature

you know, maybe that's extending the metaphor too far

but that's the situation that we'll in

STEPS TO RECOVERY

So from the living planet view

we understand that

the organs of Gaia are essential

especially those that are still intact

like the Amazon

like to some extent the Congo

like some other places on earth

that are smaller but still intact

these are reservoirs of health

these are where Gaia's memory of health

even is located

we need to protect these areas

the Amazon is a living being in and of itself

and we just have a very superficial understanding

of how that inter-relates to to the Gaian physiology

so if you reduce the Amazon to how much carbon

that it sequesters

you're gonna miss out on all of these other

physiological effects

so first priority

these places must be held sacred

if we do not do that

then even if we compensate

for the lost carbon

from the Amazon

this planet is still going to spin out of control

PRIORITY #1: SACRED

second priority is

to repair, regenerate and heal

the organs that have been damaged

particularly forests and soil

soil is probably THE most important

organ of the planet

and of course it's related to the trees

and to the prairies

and to all the other ecosystems

so regenerative agriculture for example

from the carbon lens

you can also justify this

it's probably by far

I would say it's by far the fastest way to

take carbon out of the atmosphere

there are farmers and ranchers out there

who are building topsoil

at just phenomenal rates

in school we learned it takes 500 years

to build an inch of topsoil

but the farmers out there who are doing it

in one year

taking huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere

PRIORITY #2: HEAL

so, okay

third priority is

to stop poisoning all the tissues

with herbicides, pesticides, insecticides

toxic wastes, pharmaceutical wastes, sunscreens etc. etc.

that reduces the resiliency of the planet

universally on, like a tissue level

as opposed to an organ level

like we've got to put a halt

to this 90 year experiment

what will happen if we douse the whole landscape

with insecticide

again and again

like, are we surprised now that

insect populations have declined everywhere

it's not just because of that rhough

I think a and really important and unrecognized cause

is the depletion of megafauna

that reverberates down through the food chain

so, like we don't even have to understand why

if we're coming from a living Earth perspective

we know that this is important

fourth priority is to reduce fossil fuel emissions

and this is controversial thus I put this as fourth priority

however, if you hold the first three priorities

you're necessarily going to

have to reduce fossil fuel emissions

because you can't hold ecosystem sacred

and continue to frack and drill

and strip mine

and pipeline

so the fourth priority is actually

a product of the other three

and it all comes from the same perspective

of "let's do everything we know how to do

to participate in the healing of the planet

that's why we're here

at this point in time

first the healing

and then to bring even more life

to this world

TACTICS

I think that the appropriate tactics

vary in every situation

I don't have a formula that you should do this kind of

action here and that kind of action there

but the tactics need to come from

an understanding of what we're serving here

werel serving

yeah, in one level you can say

the protection of life on Earth

or the healing of life on Earth

on another level you might also say

that we'rel serving a change in our deep narratives

and our mythology that names who we are

why we'll here

and what's real

so, I think that

part of that understanding

is understanding of each other

and even if the people that we demonize

that actually you are here to serve life, too

and it might be difficult in your situation

but you're the same as I am

instead of demonizing you

and holding you as an irredeemable

polluter or greedy or an enemy

and thinking that the only solution is

going to be to dominate you

to conquer you

to win a battle

by doing that we enemies of people

who wouldn't necessarily have to be enemies

if there were some way to invite them

into alliance

and to speak to that part of themselves

that if they really knew what was happening

they wouldn't want to do that

the despair that a lot of people feel

about the future of this Earth

draws from the same theory of change

and the same understanding of reality

that the problem comes from

basically the theory of changes

that you exerts a force on a mass

of something changes

so the more force you have

the greater power you have to change the world

from that theory of change

sorry, the powers that be in the system

they have a lot more force than you do

and you're never gonna have enough power to change anything

but maybe the world doesn't work like that

like there are other ways

to change the world besides

dominating others by force

for me hope lies in these things

hope lies in understanding that nature

where let's say other beings

can be our allies

because we're tapping into

another world of cause and effect

that puts us in the right place at the right time

saying the right words to the right person

awakening in them what has been awoken in us

bringing them into greater courage

in their service as well

maybe the change happens that way

and when we understand that

we just don't really know how this world works

and if anything, the failure of our civilization

should teach us

that we actually don't know

it should bring us to a point of humility

from that point of humility

anything is possible