There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.
―
It’s obvious, isn’t it?
Growth, our maniacal obsession with growth, is killing us and all living things.
It’s aided and abetted by neoliberalism and short-term political thinking and an ideology that insists — it’s practically a birthright — that having it all (mind, body and soul) is the apogee of a life well lived.
How did it get like this?
There is no easy answer and anything I say will appear trite, a little hollow and (more than likely) devoid of any analysis of the last, say, 200 years. But there is an apocryphal analogy that fits the brief quite nicely, namely: “The boiling frog is an apologue describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.” — Wikipedia (my emphasis added)
And to an extent we’re still there, boiling away, but this time you can’t say that you don’t know what’s coming down the track, i.e. our complete annihilation as a species at our own hands.
Of course, you may be part of the post-human school of thought that decries any degree of hopelessness or pessimism and instead me and my kind — a misanthrope by any other name — should get with the greenwashing programme. When I say greenwashing I don’t just mean all those rebrands, catchy slogans and BS adverts. I mean to suggest any notion that somehow there’s a seam of riches to be made in cleaning up the mess we’ve created over the last 100 years. The truth is you only need to look at how much rubbish we’ve buried, how many chemicals we’ve made which we know zip about and how much we’ve spewed into the atmosphere to realise that no matter how ingenious and optimistic we are, when you’ve 8 billion people all doing pretty much the same thing (the northern hemisphere is way worse than the southern hemisphere), you’ve got no chance of bringing us back to a position where we’re (and don’t laugh) safe from our egregious and continued behaviour.
In the end, with this sort of pithy post (I’m writing it before I get suited and booted for another day of legal Snakes and Ladders!) you’re probably left with the sense that none of ‘it’ really matters and all you can do is all you can do; and I get it. I really do. For me, though, I’m weary and exhausted (at least spiritually) of the same language and hubris over a subject that is the most serious of my lifetime and needs to be spoken of in those terms. Not shock, terror and loss — well, not all the time — but a deep, grief-soaked reference for what we’ve lost and the mess we’ll leave for future generations to deal with as best they can.
For now, I’ll leave you with a wonderful and powerful song from Stephen Jenkinson and Gregory Hoskins called Regrets.