PART IV
Earth and Edges
EDGES ARE WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS,” THOM HARTMANN WROTE in his book Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture. He was talking about natural edges—forests and seashores—as well as human edges like war zones and the borders between countries. In these kinds of places, he says, “we find the most visible truths about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. When we look closely at our planet, we can easily see the truth about where we’re going.”
These days we are all living on the edge. A confluence of environmental breaking points—deforestation, the collapse of ocean fisheries, the depletion of ancient aquifers, mass extinctions, and the deterioration of our atmosphere—are leading us to the precipice of disaster. With the United Nations predicting that the world’s peak population will reach 9 billion by 2050—an increase equal to the entire population of the world in 1950—it’s vital that we confront the fact of our burgeoning human population, which is driving this ecological crisis. Truthfully, Planet Earth may survive all of these threats, but human civilization as we know it will not. All the signs point to the inescapable conclusion that we’d better change our ways and soon.
Despite what the climate deniers would have you believe, climate change is not a matter of opinion; it’s hard science, as Hartmann persuasively shows in “The Atmosphere.” It’s going to take a collective effort to overcome our addiction to oil and rein in the corporations and the billionaires who are making fortunes pumping carbon into our atmosphere. We are so accustomed to thinking that for every problem, we can buy something to solve it; that technology, or some technology yet to be invented, will save us. While Hartmann doesn’t believe that technology is the answer to our problems, he is no Luddite, and he is enthusiastic about wise uses of technology.
“Cool Our Fever” chronicles the remarkable German experiment in solar energy. Germany’s investment in solar roof panels—in a country that is cloudy much of the year—has drastically reduced its reliance on fossil fuels and provided its citizens with a clean, renewable form of energy. More solar panels cover rooftops in Germany than in the US and Japan combined. If it can happen there, why not here?
Hartmann has long held that our attitudes are just as damaging to the world’s ecosystems as our behavior. By disconnecting ourselves from the natural world, “shrinking into separateness” as we watch the glowing boxes in our living rooms, we have brought about our own destruction. The answer to our global dilemma is simple and obvious: If we want to change our world, we must change our worldview. We must return to an older-culture way of being, a perspective that has been buried and forgotten. As we reestablish the links to what we knew in the past, we can reclaim our future. We can live well without destroying the world around us.
The older-culture worldview is a close cousin to deep ecology and to the Buddhist principle of interdependence. It highlights the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life, holding that all life forms have an inherent right to life and are not here on earth to serve and supply us. As Hartmann illustrates in “The Death of the Trees” and “Something Will Save Us,” this is a powerfully transformative viewpoint.
People often hear that our way of life is unsustainable, but at the same time they must not really hear it because they don’t change their behavior. That’s because they are stuck in the rut of younger-culture thinking, a blindly adolescent mindset that feels it is entitled to everything it has and more. What Hartmann proposes is an evolution of consciousness, the collective awakening we so desperately need: “If we were to set aside our assumption of supremacy and instead adopt the older-culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet.”