"here we are on the cusp of a terrifying election where many of our basic rights are on the line. It's not just our rights that are at risk; the rights of nature and all our wild neighbors are also in danger."
I think that statement warrants deeper exploration as there is a lot to unpack there regarding what "rights" are, where they come from and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the implied notion that democratic elections have the potential to either result in us (and/or our non-human kin) having rights 'taken away' or 'given to us'.
We have been indoctrinated into dogmatic system of belief since we were very young that involuntary governance structures (which use violent coercion and propaganda to enforce a multi-generational racketeering operation) are "good" (or at the very least "necessary") and that democracy is a moral and righteous system of governance. All of that is a lie.
We were born with all the same "rights" as any other being on the planet, no system of violent coercion, voting for who will rule over us, and/or thinly veiled corporate plutocracy can put our rights at risk. Each and everyone of us is the only being that can put our rights at risk through internalizing lies, propaganda, anthropocentric dogma and ego flattering nonsense about how "civilized" we all for participating in "democracy". We must all consciously know what is right and what is wrong through truly looking inward to know our Self, have a direct relationship with the Creator/Divine being and thus be capable of discerning what is moral and what is not, and then guiding our actions accordingly. No institution, no man in a suit, no writing on paper and no man with a badge or a gun can do that for us and none of those people can prevent us from doing that either. It is just a choice, each and every day, we have that choice.
Each one of us are co-authors in the story of our human family and how we interact and connect with our fellow non-human beings on Earth. Each action is a prayer that says to the universe "This is what a human being Is". Inaction or pretending that some institution is either preventing us from doing the right thing, or commanding us to do the wrong thing, is also a choice, and a prayer and it sends out ripples into the fabric of Creation.
Democratic elections are nothing more than an elaborate circus and the systems of governance they claim to legitimize are built on (and necessitate) industrial scale mass murder and ecological devastation.
I propose that involuntary governance structures (such as democratic governments) are inherently immoral, they breed corruption/sociopathy in the masses, attract psychopaths into leadership positions and they are systems that not only inevitably result in ecological devastation, they necessitate it.
We do not need democracy, it needs us, and it feeds on us like a parasite.
For nearly a millennium, our Druidic and Celtic ancestors the lived without a state under a legal system known as Brehon Law. They revered the trees and non-human beings and would have continued to do so were it not for the Roman Statists that decimated their culture and the sacred forests it was built upon.
I explore why I believe that to be the case and offer other historical examples of how ancient cultures developed a moral compass and thrived here on Turtle Island without any systems of government that used violent coercion (without police, without involuntary taxation and without prisons ) in this essay:
I agree with Dr. Lyla June in her assertion that our belief in the dogmas of Statism and "Civilization" has tricked and brainwashed us all. For more on her thoughts on that, watch: https://youtu.be/fYVBjgHRmus?si=j8KV138VmWoRFQKS
Thank you for evoking this strong emotion and line of thought in me through your post Vanessa.
Regarding the climate action aspect of the post, I will re-share the following excerpt from Charles Eisenstein's (from Climate — A New Story, Chapter 7: The Revolution is Love, “The Concrete World” and “The Conditions of Our Choice”)
“I have referenced the idea that human well-being and planetary health are inextricably connected, and that no such future is possible. I will now explore the opposite idea: that human ingenuity is unlimited, as is our capacity to replace ecosystem services with technological substitutes.
In other words, what if the version of the Story of Interbeing I’ve given you is wrong? What if we can, in fact, forever insulate ourselves from the effects of our actions?
This passage evokes a nightmare world where the entire biosphere has been converted to a giant feedlot and industrial park, where we manage the planet like a machine with technological tweaks to its gross material components, where no species exists that has not been turned to human purposes. It is a world wholly toxic to life except within artificially maintained enclaves. It is a world of vat-grown meat, computerized hydroponic greenhouses instead of farms, algae pools for oxygen, carbon-sucking machines to regulate the atmosphere, desalinization plants, climate-controlled air-filtered bubble cities, and a planetary surface converted to one huge mine and garbage dump. In that world, human life becomes entirely dependent on technology, as we retreat from the ugliness we have wrought into an artificial or even a virtual environment. Can you say this isn’t already under way? This is not a world I would want to live in. No one would, yet for thousands of years, humanity in aggregate has proceeded choice by choice, step by step toward a Concrete World. I would like to dismiss it as impossible on ecological grounds, but what if it is possible? What if, instead of being compelled to reject it, we must consciously choose a different path?
Climate activists are fond of saying, “We are going to have to change now.” Maybe the significance of climate change is not “Change or perish,” but an invitation to reorient civilization toward beauty rather than quantity. Starkly confronting us with the results of our power, it asks, “What kind of world do you want to live in?”
Whether or not endless technological adaptation to an ever-more-degraded ecosystem is actually possible, the perception that it is possible indeed presents us with the necessity of making a conscious choice. If ecological degradation had the power to force us to choose a healing path, it would have happened already. Therefore, that choice to take the healing path will have to be made on some basis other than compulsion. It will not come through fear of personal or civilizational extinction.
I want to repeat: if ecological degradation had the power to force us to choose a healing path, it would have happened already.
Is the choice to heal ever really forced on us? Some people quit smoking on the first diagnosis of lung disease; others persist in smoking through their tracheostomy hole even as lung cancer wracks their body. What is happening when we reach that critical moment where we hit bottom, where the old life becomes intolerable? When do we say, “Enough. I’m out of here”? When do we finally quit that job, leave that relationship, take that journey, quit that addiction, release that grudge? Usually a course reversal toward wholeness is sparked by some kind of crisis, but it is not guaranteed by one. Each crisis, each tragedy, each new injury or loss is an invitation onto a different path. It is up to us to accept that invitation.
As the deterioration of the biosphere proceeds, we will surely face many crises, tragedies, and losses. If fear of further loss is not enough to change our course, what is? The dominant environmental narrative, especially when it comes to climate, is based on fear of consequences for humanity. What do we choose from when we don’t choose from that fear?
Most people will offer love as the antipode of fear. I’m wary of this formula, which veers close to replicating the familiar paradigm of good versus evil. Fear is not always a bad thing; sometimes it can heighten one’s wakefulness and focus, and catalyze action. That action might be in service of those we love; it needn’t be in service of self-preservation. We care about what we love, even when that caring in no rational way contributes to our measurable benefit. Sometimes we even sacrifice our lives for what we love. Love makes us care more passionately than self-interest can, and, as Dr. Seuss put it in The Lorax, “Unless we begin caring a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Nature might not save us from ourselves.
So the care we need to live in a more beautiful world comes from love. But how does love awaken? One way is through loss, grief, and the realization of death. When a friend or family member falls ill or has a near brush with death, or enters into the dying process, the reality of their preciousness overcomes my holding patterns and opens me to deeper care. Unfortunately, these holding patterns have a powerful ally in modern society’s denial of death—its fetish for youth, preservation, and growth. Denial of death holds life at bay too. It usurps love and enthrones the pretender we call ego. Modern civilization upholds an equivalent pretense in its ideology of human exceptionalism: that human beings and human society can be exempt from limits. The untrammeled growth of the separate self, whether the personal self or the collective human self, is inimical to love. Therefore, death, loss, and grief are love’s allies.
Another partner of love, in its awakening and its expression, is beauty. We fall in love with what is beautiful, and we see beauty in what we love. Let us consider beauty then to replace utilitarian benefit as the motivation and aim of humanity’s relation to the world. Whether or not a world of rats and concrete is survivable, it is definitely not as beautiful as the “once and future world” that MacKinnon describes.[6] Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:
'Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”
I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now. MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.
Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.
I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all.
Despite all that has been lost in our progress toward a concrete world, much beauty remains. The earth is still alive. Now is the time to choose life. It is not too late.
..Most people would acknowledge a feeling of loss at the thought of a world without elephants, rhinos, or whales. But, the cynic might say, we’ll get used to it and not know that anything is missing, just as you probably are not mourning the loss of the Pyrenean ibex or the hundreds of nameless species going extinct every year. However, in the Story of Interbeing, where self is relationship, each extinction impoverishes the web of relationships on Earth that includes ourselves; it shrinks us and simplifies us. Extinctions are the end result of an ideology that makes other beings into less than full beings and excludes them from the circle of self. First, they are cast out of full existence via our belief system; in the end, the casting out takes irrevocable physical form. First, the mythology of separation isolates us from our companions, who are really part of ourselves; then those companions perish forever.
This impoverishment goes beyond outright extinction. Many species, while not entirely extinct, persist as remnant populations on tiny fragments of their former range. Thus they recede from our lived experience. Moreover, modern people live almost entirely in a realm of products, media, and the indoors, estranging them from the life forms remaining in their ambit. I cannot identify the name and likeness of more than ten bird species from their songs. Can you? I hope you can, but I think most in my culture cannot. This degree of alienation is normal now.
One consequence of this is an ever-growing loneliness, an ache that nothing in the indoor world, manufactured world, or digital world can assuage. We miss the complement of our relationships in all their diversity. Standardized, digitized, or abstract relationships do not nourish full beingness. Surrounded by standardized commodities, visiting public spaces filled with strangers, interacting increasingly through the internet, and distanced from intimate relationship with nature in a world of climate-controlled houses, packaged food, and machine-mediated labor, we are poor in our very existence. Do we still survive? Yes. From the perspective of the Story of Separation, we continue to exist. But it is a partial, anemic existence. For the interconnected self, existence is not a yes/no. Existence admits to degrees that depend on wealth of relationship.
I think that “Could we survive in a ruined world of synthetic food and concrete algae pools?” is the wrong question. Better questions might be “What will we become?” “Who do we want to be?” and “What kind of world shall we choose?”
The general ecological crisis may not be about the survival of our species at all. It may be an initiation into a new orientation altogether. The question then becomes not whether we can survive, but how we want to live. It becomes no longer how to achieve sustainability, but what we want to sustain.
Let us grant for a moment the premise of the technological fixers.. ..If that is so, if we can manifest anything we put our minds to, then why settle for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year? And why settle for the inner desolation that accompanies it? Yes, perhaps we could use technology to compensate for the loss of ecosystem services. And yes, perhaps we could remediate the corresponding inner loss with technology too, with psychiatric medication, with “content-rich” virtual realities to compensate for the impoverishment of outer reality, with a profusion of diversions and stimulation to assuage the aesthetic, sensual, and psychic hunger caused by the depletion of the natural world. Perhaps we could.
But even if we could, we don’t have to. We could instead devote this “limitless human ingenuity” to the wholeness and beauty of the entire world, applying what might be called “technologies of reunion” to the restoration of inner and outer landscapes. Granted the prodigious power of the human will, we might change the question I just asked, “Why settle for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year?” into another: “Why have we settled for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year?”
If we cannot answer that question, and if we cannot change the conditions of that choice, then there is no hope that we will reverse course. No hope at all. We will continue to settle for what we have always settled for.
In our hands we are,
the Earth and all its earthlings.
We will do our part.
Beautiful. 💚
Faithful and curious,
we soothe, care for each other,
and Mother Earth heals.
RE:
"here we are on the cusp of a terrifying election where many of our basic rights are on the line. It's not just our rights that are at risk; the rights of nature and all our wild neighbors are also in danger."
I think that statement warrants deeper exploration as there is a lot to unpack there regarding what "rights" are, where they come from and lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the implied notion that democratic elections have the potential to either result in us (and/or our non-human kin) having rights 'taken away' or 'given to us'.
We have been indoctrinated into dogmatic system of belief since we were very young that involuntary governance structures (which use violent coercion and propaganda to enforce a multi-generational racketeering operation) are "good" (or at the very least "necessary") and that democracy is a moral and righteous system of governance. All of that is a lie.
We were born with all the same "rights" as any other being on the planet, no system of violent coercion, voting for who will rule over us, and/or thinly veiled corporate plutocracy can put our rights at risk. Each and everyone of us is the only being that can put our rights at risk through internalizing lies, propaganda, anthropocentric dogma and ego flattering nonsense about how "civilized" we all for participating in "democracy". We must all consciously know what is right and what is wrong through truly looking inward to know our Self, have a direct relationship with the Creator/Divine being and thus be capable of discerning what is moral and what is not, and then guiding our actions accordingly. No institution, no man in a suit, no writing on paper and no man with a badge or a gun can do that for us and none of those people can prevent us from doing that either. It is just a choice, each and every day, we have that choice.
Each one of us are co-authors in the story of our human family and how we interact and connect with our fellow non-human beings on Earth. Each action is a prayer that says to the universe "This is what a human being Is". Inaction or pretending that some institution is either preventing us from doing the right thing, or commanding us to do the wrong thing, is also a choice, and a prayer and it sends out ripples into the fabric of Creation.
Democratic elections are nothing more than an elaborate circus and the systems of governance they claim to legitimize are built on (and necessitate) industrial scale mass murder and ecological devastation.
I propose that involuntary governance structures (such as democratic governments) are inherently immoral, they breed corruption/sociopathy in the masses, attract psychopaths into leadership positions and they are systems that not only inevitably result in ecological devastation, they necessitate it.
We do not need democracy, it needs us, and it feeds on us like a parasite.
For nearly a millennium, our Druidic and Celtic ancestors the lived without a state under a legal system known as Brehon Law. They revered the trees and non-human beings and would have continued to do so were it not for the Roman Statists that decimated their culture and the sacred forests it was built upon.
I explore why I believe that to be the case and offer other historical examples of how ancient cultures developed a moral compass and thrived here on Turtle Island without any systems of government that used violent coercion (without police, without involuntary taxation and without prisons ) in this essay:
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/why-involuntary-governance-structures
I agree with Dr. Lyla June in her assertion that our belief in the dogmas of Statism and "Civilization" has tricked and brainwashed us all. For more on her thoughts on that, watch: https://youtu.be/fYVBjgHRmus?si=j8KV138VmWoRFQKS
Thank you for evoking this strong emotion and line of thought in me through your post Vanessa.
Regarding the climate action aspect of the post, I will re-share the following excerpt from Charles Eisenstein's (from Climate — A New Story, Chapter 7: The Revolution is Love, “The Concrete World” and “The Conditions of Our Choice”)
“I have referenced the idea that human well-being and planetary health are inextricably connected, and that no such future is possible. I will now explore the opposite idea: that human ingenuity is unlimited, as is our capacity to replace ecosystem services with technological substitutes.
In other words, what if the version of the Story of Interbeing I’ve given you is wrong? What if we can, in fact, forever insulate ourselves from the effects of our actions?
This passage evokes a nightmare world where the entire biosphere has been converted to a giant feedlot and industrial park, where we manage the planet like a machine with technological tweaks to its gross material components, where no species exists that has not been turned to human purposes. It is a world wholly toxic to life except within artificially maintained enclaves. It is a world of vat-grown meat, computerized hydroponic greenhouses instead of farms, algae pools for oxygen, carbon-sucking machines to regulate the atmosphere, desalinization plants, climate-controlled air-filtered bubble cities, and a planetary surface converted to one huge mine and garbage dump. In that world, human life becomes entirely dependent on technology, as we retreat from the ugliness we have wrought into an artificial or even a virtual environment. Can you say this isn’t already under way? This is not a world I would want to live in. No one would, yet for thousands of years, humanity in aggregate has proceeded choice by choice, step by step toward a Concrete World. I would like to dismiss it as impossible on ecological grounds, but what if it is possible? What if, instead of being compelled to reject it, we must consciously choose a different path?
Climate activists are fond of saying, “We are going to have to change now.” Maybe the significance of climate change is not “Change or perish,” but an invitation to reorient civilization toward beauty rather than quantity. Starkly confronting us with the results of our power, it asks, “What kind of world do you want to live in?”
Whether or not endless technological adaptation to an ever-more-degraded ecosystem is actually possible, the perception that it is possible indeed presents us with the necessity of making a conscious choice. If ecological degradation had the power to force us to choose a healing path, it would have happened already. Therefore, that choice to take the healing path will have to be made on some basis other than compulsion. It will not come through fear of personal or civilizational extinction.
I want to repeat: if ecological degradation had the power to force us to choose a healing path, it would have happened already.
Is the choice to heal ever really forced on us? Some people quit smoking on the first diagnosis of lung disease; others persist in smoking through their tracheostomy hole even as lung cancer wracks their body. What is happening when we reach that critical moment where we hit bottom, where the old life becomes intolerable? When do we say, “Enough. I’m out of here”? When do we finally quit that job, leave that relationship, take that journey, quit that addiction, release that grudge? Usually a course reversal toward wholeness is sparked by some kind of crisis, but it is not guaranteed by one. Each crisis, each tragedy, each new injury or loss is an invitation onto a different path. It is up to us to accept that invitation.
As the deterioration of the biosphere proceeds, we will surely face many crises, tragedies, and losses. If fear of further loss is not enough to change our course, what is? The dominant environmental narrative, especially when it comes to climate, is based on fear of consequences for humanity. What do we choose from when we don’t choose from that fear?
Most people will offer love as the antipode of fear. I’m wary of this formula, which veers close to replicating the familiar paradigm of good versus evil. Fear is not always a bad thing; sometimes it can heighten one’s wakefulness and focus, and catalyze action. That action might be in service of those we love; it needn’t be in service of self-preservation. We care about what we love, even when that caring in no rational way contributes to our measurable benefit. Sometimes we even sacrifice our lives for what we love. Love makes us care more passionately than self-interest can, and, as Dr. Seuss put it in The Lorax, “Unless we begin caring a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Nature might not save us from ourselves.
So the care we need to live in a more beautiful world comes from love. But how does love awaken? One way is through loss, grief, and the realization of death. When a friend or family member falls ill or has a near brush with death, or enters into the dying process, the reality of their preciousness overcomes my holding patterns and opens me to deeper care. Unfortunately, these holding patterns have a powerful ally in modern society’s denial of death—its fetish for youth, preservation, and growth. Denial of death holds life at bay too. It usurps love and enthrones the pretender we call ego. Modern civilization upholds an equivalent pretense in its ideology of human exceptionalism: that human beings and human society can be exempt from limits. The untrammeled growth of the separate self, whether the personal self or the collective human self, is inimical to love. Therefore, death, loss, and grief are love’s allies.
Another partner of love, in its awakening and its expression, is beauty. We fall in love with what is beautiful, and we see beauty in what we love. Let us consider beauty then to replace utilitarian benefit as the motivation and aim of humanity’s relation to the world. Whether or not a world of rats and concrete is survivable, it is definitely not as beautiful as the “once and future world” that MacKinnon describes.[6] Explorers and naturalists of previous centuries give staggering testimony to the incredible natural wealth of North America and other places before colonization. Here are some images from another book, Steve Nicholls’s Paradise Found:
'Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands “as full of birds as a meadow is full of grass.” Whales so numerous they were a hazard to shipping, their spouts filling the entire sea with foam. Oysters more than a foot wide. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten). Cod fisheries where “the number of the cod seems equal that of the grains of sand.” A man who reported “more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists could dine on it and still have some left.”
I used the word “incredible” advisedly when I introduced these images. Incredible means something like “impossible to believe”; indeed, incredulity is a common response when we are confronted with evidence that things were once vastly different than they are now. MacKinnon illustrates this phenomenon, known in psychology as “change blindness,” with an anecdote about fish photographs from the Florida Keys. Old photographs from the 1940s show delighted fishermen displaying their prize catches—marlins as long as a man is tall. When present-day fishermen see those pictures, they flat-out refuse to believe they are authentic.
Human beings tend to be blind to gradual changes in their environment, assuming that the way things are right now is how they always have been and always will be. We do not miss the former beauty of the world, he would say, because we have never known it.
I am not so sure that we don’t miss it. I think we do miss it, but we don’t know what it is we are missing. We feel a void, a sense of poverty, a hunger for something unidentifiable. Transferred onto money or consumer items, that hunger drives continued cycles of destruction. Transferred onto drugs, gambling, alcohol, it drives the unsolvable social problem of addiction. Perhaps the degradation of nature is not without its consequences after all.
Despite all that has been lost in our progress toward a concrete world, much beauty remains. The earth is still alive. Now is the time to choose life. It is not too late.
(continued..)
(..continued from comment above)
..Most people would acknowledge a feeling of loss at the thought of a world without elephants, rhinos, or whales. But, the cynic might say, we’ll get used to it and not know that anything is missing, just as you probably are not mourning the loss of the Pyrenean ibex or the hundreds of nameless species going extinct every year. However, in the Story of Interbeing, where self is relationship, each extinction impoverishes the web of relationships on Earth that includes ourselves; it shrinks us and simplifies us. Extinctions are the end result of an ideology that makes other beings into less than full beings and excludes them from the circle of self. First, they are cast out of full existence via our belief system; in the end, the casting out takes irrevocable physical form. First, the mythology of separation isolates us from our companions, who are really part of ourselves; then those companions perish forever.
This impoverishment goes beyond outright extinction. Many species, while not entirely extinct, persist as remnant populations on tiny fragments of their former range. Thus they recede from our lived experience. Moreover, modern people live almost entirely in a realm of products, media, and the indoors, estranging them from the life forms remaining in their ambit. I cannot identify the name and likeness of more than ten bird species from their songs. Can you? I hope you can, but I think most in my culture cannot. This degree of alienation is normal now.
One consequence of this is an ever-growing loneliness, an ache that nothing in the indoor world, manufactured world, or digital world can assuage. We miss the complement of our relationships in all their diversity. Standardized, digitized, or abstract relationships do not nourish full beingness. Surrounded by standardized commodities, visiting public spaces filled with strangers, interacting increasingly through the internet, and distanced from intimate relationship with nature in a world of climate-controlled houses, packaged food, and machine-mediated labor, we are poor in our very existence. Do we still survive? Yes. From the perspective of the Story of Separation, we continue to exist. But it is a partial, anemic existence. For the interconnected self, existence is not a yes/no. Existence admits to degrees that depend on wealth of relationship.
I think that “Could we survive in a ruined world of synthetic food and concrete algae pools?” is the wrong question. Better questions might be “What will we become?” “Who do we want to be?” and “What kind of world shall we choose?”
The general ecological crisis may not be about the survival of our species at all. It may be an initiation into a new orientation altogether. The question then becomes not whether we can survive, but how we want to live. It becomes no longer how to achieve sustainability, but what we want to sustain.
Let us grant for a moment the premise of the technological fixers.. ..If that is so, if we can manifest anything we put our minds to, then why settle for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year? And why settle for the inner desolation that accompanies it? Yes, perhaps we could use technology to compensate for the loss of ecosystem services. And yes, perhaps we could remediate the corresponding inner loss with technology too, with psychiatric medication, with “content-rich” virtual realities to compensate for the impoverishment of outer reality, with a profusion of diversions and stimulation to assuage the aesthetic, sensual, and psychic hunger caused by the depletion of the natural world. Perhaps we could.
But even if we could, we don’t have to. We could instead devote this “limitless human ingenuity” to the wholeness and beauty of the entire world, applying what might be called “technologies of reunion” to the restoration of inner and outer landscapes. Granted the prodigious power of the human will, we might change the question I just asked, “Why settle for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year?” into another: “Why have we settled for a world that grows uglier and more degraded with each passing year?”
If we cannot answer that question, and if we cannot change the conditions of that choice, then there is no hope that we will reverse course. No hope at all. We will continue to settle for what we have always settled for.
(source: https://charleseisenstein.org/books/climate-a-new-story/eng/the-concrete-world/ )