PSYCHOSCAPES: Helpless But Not Hopeless

Me solarized in Photoshop

Helpless But Not Hopeless

It’s taken me 75 years to get to this place: Bobbing around in my kayak in the rosy, luminescent water of Jenness Pond at dusk, my rational mind took flight, merging me with the beating heart of the Earth.

During my lifetime, the Earth has taken a terrible beating. When I was born, the oceans were practically as pure as when the Vikings roamed the seas. Now, plastics pollute the oceans and clog the gullets of the fish and birds the reside there. Each year another 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the ocean. “That’s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around the world.”^⁠1

Experts agree that this “Great Acceleration” started around 1950: that’s when a sudden and dramatic jump in consumption began, followed by a huge rise in global population, and an explosion in the use of plastics. Facing up to what we have done is mortifying. Yet, that is the first step in forging a deeper, more intimate, and sustainable relationship with our home.

Growing up, like most Americans, I thought the Earth was the most solid, unchanging, and boring entity imaginable, immune to human harm: An inexhaustible treasure house, a self-service supermarket for humankind.

My whole life has been a re-education project, prompted by books like Small is Beautiful, Silent Spring, Practice of the Wild, The Spell of the Sensuous – and most recently, Timefulness: How Thinking like a geologist can help save the world by Marcia Bjornerud. She’s opening up my eyes and heart to how sprightly, tempestuous, and turbulent the Earth really is.^⁠2

To us in human time, mountains are the embodiment of stability and strength, but, in geologic time, mountains are fluid and fleeting, rising up by volcanic action, eroding away to nothing, and then starting over again, time after time over the eons. Through that and other examples, Bjornerud shows how all of nature is alive, even rocks. That’s why she calls them verbs, not nouns.

This Great Acceleration has created massive changes to the Earth. Now a single mine in Canada’s tar sands region moves 30 billion tons of sediment annually, double the quantity moved by all the worlds’ rivers combined. The weight of the freshwater we have redistributed has slowed the Earth’s rotation.^⁠3 And last week, we learned that the rapid melting of the Greenland icecap is causing the Gulf stream to weaken and the jet stream to wander.

Scientists tell us that, thanks to our meddling, we can’t predict the future because there are too many imponderables. Uncertainty reigns in the face of enigmatic geologic forces infinitely greater than ourselves.

Yet we're like narcissistic teenagers living for the moment, insisting on having things our way. Our political ideologies and religions have brainwashed us to believe we are unique, the apex species anointed by our gods to have dominion over the Earth. But now, having tipped the balance too far, we see our vanities and hubris are like an early morning mist about to be blown away by the first breeze.

What can be done? The first step is to admit we have a problem as folks do in AA. The next step is to re-define what it means to be 'helpless', as Kurt Spellmeyer accomplishes with a brilliant juitsu move in the current Tricycle Magazine: He reframes being helpless as a transcendental experience rather than – as our macho society scornfully regards it – 'a moral failure, a cause for shame, or a condition to be over come by heroic acts."

"Not until events escaping their control bring people face-to-face with their helplessness will they discover that they belong to something larger than themselves: an ‘unlimited body,’”^⁠4 To my way of thinking, this ‘unlimited body’ is the body of the Earth itself, the entity to whom indigenous people have always bowed down to.

The turning point won’t happen until we hit rock bottom: when worsening conditions from accelerating climate change render us so vulnerable and unprotected that we will have no choice but to reach out for assistance and solace from our neighbors, great and small, while they, in turn, will be reaching out to us. This collective outpouring of compassion will unleash a tsunami wave of action powerful enough to save what is left of our home. And, as a side benefit, we will restore meaning and honor back into our lives.

When that happens, Spellmeyer tells us, our feelings of resignation and powerlessness will be transformed by "an embrace" as the world encircles us in its arms and whispers, “relax, you're home."

xxx

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