Hazel Henderson — futurist, small-is-beautiful economist and major thinker in the early Earth Day era of environmentalism — never took the time to be depressed about the future she saw ahead.
An influential figure in the sustainability movement since the 1970s, Henderson wrote in her l988 book, “The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics,” that “if we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.”
That’s what all of us, it seems to me, are required to do these days — greet the future with renewed enthusiasm grounded in our secure knowledge we don’t know enough to be depressed and throw in the towel.
None of us but the most prescient, and ignored, scientists could have predicted with any certainty in January that we’d be in the seventh week of a national and international lockdown and economic depression on Earth Day 2020. Nor could we have foreseen that well over 50,000 Americans would be dead from COVID-19 before the middle of Spring.
And who could have forecast that a week after Earth Day the temperature in New Mexico would be some ten degrees above normal, somewhere in the high 80s to low 90s — in April?
My new peas won’t like the heat at all, but my garden and its feral landscape in the North Valley will love it at first. I worry though, of course, about this early heat. Does it mean we’ll have a longer than normal scorcher this summer? Is this a symptom of the now fully documented megadrought we’ve been experiencing since 2000 in the Southwest? An article published this month in Scientific American shows through tree ring dating and soil samples how this 20-year drought is “the worst one in 500 years.”
How will we handle deep drought, coronavirus, sweltering at home and a sinking economy all at the same time?
Lots of small farmers and gardeners like me have been worrying about what’s “normal” for quite a while now. Probably everyone up and down the Middle Rio Grande Valley lost a bumper crop of apricots and other fruits to that deep freeze ten nights ago or so. But that’s nothing new. Almost 90-degree weather a week later, however, is sorta new, in my memory.
But “what’s the use in worrying? It never was worthwhile.” True enough, except it’s hard to put your mind somewhere positive when your head is full of a half-century of dire warnings about resource depletion, drought, pollution, pandemics, famine and global warming. It’s especially hard now when COVID-19 terrors are addling a lot of us. And harder still because the snarling reactionaries who considered those warnings to be not only merely “doom and gloom” but in fact a conspiracy of economic treason, and who opposed them with all their might and money, are horribly bungling our response to this virus now.
It’s way too late for “I told you so,” but with the world’s economy in a fantastic negative free fall as most of the 9 billion of us on the planet struggle to survive this virus, those dire warning are proving to be irrefutably true.
This is where the wisdom of Hazel Henderson can give us strength. She makes it clear in wonderful language that it is still, as it always has been, up to us to make the world of the future something that life on earth can survive. That’s why even in these increasingly frightening times, we cannot count on any intelligence or courage but our own. As Henderson said, “Individuals learn faster than institutions, and it is always the dinosaur’s brain that is the last to get the new message.”
In the 50 years since the first Earth Day, millions upon millions of the world’s people, including Americans in their vast numbers, have become environmentally sensitized and activated to help create a sustainable world that the dinosaurs in power — both in the boardroom and government — could never fathom.
“I make no pretensions to ‘objectivity,’” Henderson said, it’s “a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation states, or the requirements of commerce.” Millions of people, empowered by environmental conscience, have not been able to budge very far the intellectual mercenaries that operate our world. But their worldview is showing even some Republicans that it is bankrupt, that the feeble-minded mercenaries have gotten it wrong in virtually every possible way.
But we are still here. Some of us are even still agitating. And I suspect after COVID-19 — and all that it means to society, science and the economy — our resolve will be greater than it’s ever been. “Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition,” Henderson affirms, “because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that presents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacity confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth.”
How many ways and over how many years have we heard and agreed with this argument, nodded our heads but then found ourselves again being stymied by those who think we are fools and parasites?
But if billions of us around the world can discipline ourselves to change our entire way of life in less than a month for the sake of our health, the health of our families and friends, and for the common good, we have astonishing new information about ourselves, about how capable and altruistic we really are. This is no time to fall into the trap of pessimism, for as we see, we don’t know enough, at all, about the enormous capacities of the human will and spirit.
Global warming can be slowed, even stopped, just as the spread of COVID-19 can, by each of us activating the paradigm of sustainability, both in our personal behavior and in our political efforts and associations. The struggle is still viable, and I am more and more convinced that we are closer to prevailing than we think.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Individual power and control, in the form of hubris, is a narcotic for many. If folks merely subscribed to the ideal, love thy neighbor as thyself, the mayhem would be much more limited. Ironically, repairing connections to each other and the natural world around us is the key to survival during this period of physical separation .
I’m with you, V.B. This may sound crazy but in some ways I dread the end of this pandemic because of the desire of most people, and certainly “industry,” to get back to “normal.” We need a total revolution in values and thinking if we are to save ourselves. God forbid we ever get back to “normal.” But that’s what the majority wants, apparently. We need a new, global “shelter in place” paradigm, otherwise known as localism. One could also expand the concept of shelter in place in terms of a radical re-thinking of what “growth” means. Is a continuous, mad, expansion of the economy our most essential value? What does “economic growth” mean? What is “economy’? Whose economy is it? Hopefully, enough people are beginning to understand this and free themselves from the “trap of pessimism.” And yeah, I’m a gardener too. 90 degrees in April is insane.