Pessimism is often indicative of exceptional privilege
The planet we make will reflect the people we are. – Erle C. Ellis
Want to know more about what pessimism and beavers have to do with our efforts to stop our destruction of life on Earth? Read on! Recently I have been accused of being a “doomer” by focusing too much on facing hard reality; ie. what is wrong. So, to make clear that I am not a “doomer” today I will focus more on the ‘accomplishing seeming miracles” part of the quote by Ellis, a Professor who studies the “ecology of human landscapes”. Within limits, it has been my experience that Ellis is correct. Does that make me an optimist? I think so.
Let’s start off in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1982. I was at a Cabaret that was VERY political. It was at the time when the Americans had just installed medium range nuclear missiles in western Germany and the people there were protesting like mad. It was the start of the Green party and the environmental movement in Germany so emotions were intense. The title of Cabaret was something like “Wer A sagt muss auch B sagen.” For those of you who don’t know German that means: “ Whoever says A must also say B.” That probably doesn’t help much. Well, it turns out that it is a slang expression for “If you have no constructive solution to a problem you are ranting about shut up.” Yes, rather blunt. Rather rude. But totally true. That’s why I dislike pessimism – it’s too easy. Of course we all makes mistakes. Yes, governments are stupid. Yes, corporations are greedy and only care about their profits. So what! That’s like complaining about gravity or the sunrise, what’s the point? The fact is when good people trust each other to cooperate to accomplish a common goal [almost] they can accomplish anything. Yes [almost] anything!
We got to the moon. We eradicated smallpox. We have increased our average lifespan [in rich countries] from 40 to 80+ years. The global literacy rate is 86%! This is all good news! Of course we have a few problems, but the evidence is that when we put our minds to it – think of the Montreal Protocol to eliminate CFCs – we can and have accomplished what had seemed a miracle. This point of view was made famous by Steven Pinkerton who said:
“Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Peace is better than war. Freedom is better than tyranny. Literacy is better than illiteracy. We have all these things in greater plenitude today than we did 100 years ago, when our planet was far less populated and we lived far shorter lives. So why are so many people so negative?”
As far as the above quote goes, I agree with Pinkerton. Does he go a bit too far in being techno – optimist and see the world with rose coloured glasses that miss seeing the ugly side effects of our successes? Absolutely! But, within limits, a word that is near and dear to us at the Club of Rome, his thesis that by being positive and optimistic we have improved the lives of billions is true! We should commend ourselves on our successes, but, of course, not rest on our laurels. We must continue to change and evolve our thinking to deal with the significant negative side effects of our success. That does not make our efforts failures. That does mean that we are doomed. Far from it. The only thing that dooms us is complacency. Or denial. Or despair. Or lack of cooperation. People can and have and will continue to achieve “miracles” – but only they are optimists and never, never, NEVER give up.
I am going out on a limb and taking a totally optimistic view of our current predicament
Want a concrete example of how focusing on what’s wrong instead of what’s right only makes everything worse? It is the rise, and I think probable election as PM, of Pierre Polievre, the new Conservative leader. I have fought against him in several elections and all he does is point out what’s wrong and then state some vague, Mother hood statement like “Canadians need more freedom from government regulation to achieve their dreams.” [not a direct quote from him, but pretty close]. Because people are obsessed by what is wrong he resonates with their fears and the result is a probable Pierre as PM. This is what being a pessimist breeds: simplistic responses to complex problems. This is from The Line news on Spet.13:
The new Conservative leader speaks in the language of societal decline
Reactionary Poilievre haters might suggest the difference is that he speaks the language of online trolls, but on this point their criticism will always fail. “As I always have, I denounce racism and anyone who spreads it,” Poilievre said responding to his handshake with MacKenzie. And he’s right. He doesn’t say racist things. He doesn’t say extremist things. As much as his critics want to believe it, Poilievre doesn’t sound like a far-right Telegram channel. But he does sound like something — something different than what we’re used to hearing. Something online. What the new Conservative leader does is speak in a kind of meta-text. An internet language of decline.
In a recent online video, Poilievre spoke with a young man named Phelong, an international student from Vietnam, about one of Poilievre’s favourite topics: gatekeepers. People like Phelong, Poilievre said, “want to get ahead based on merit, not political connections.” Phelong, clutching a mug with the words “Leftist tears” on it, nodded along. Poilievre hates gatekeepers. And he sees them everywhere. “Gatekeepers and corporate oligarchs are apoplectic that I’m going to scrap their crony capitalism,” read the tweet attached to the video.
According to Poilievre, gatekeepers are responsible for: passport service delays; keeping the arctic gateway closed; preventing truckers from delivering food; preventing farmers from producing food; preventing people from buying a house; preventing jets from landing at Billy Bishop Airport. As much as it seems like the message Poilievre is delivering is about so-called gatekeepers, it’s not. It’s actually about societal decline, or even collapse. This is the meta-message Poilievre projects if you listen closely enough. And it aligns with the general tone of online discourse currently, and of the past few years. The positivity of the early days of social media — flash-mobs, dance sequences, marriage proposals — has been long buried by the algorithmic favour for negativity engagement, a much more powerful force, that engenders a more global negative chaos mentality created by how it presents information (confused, disorganized, and immediate) and via its default sentiment framing for maximum reaction (pessimistic, cynical and bleak). As anyone online will tell you, everything is terrible now, which is always.
“GO Train cancellations, and a potential strike. ER departments closing due to nursing and staffing shortages. Airport baggage handling delays and flight cancellations. [Toronto Police Service] not enforcing traffic laws. Violence on the [Toronto transit]. Toronto city councillors quitting due to workload. All of this, and no reassuring plan to fix it,” a user posted to subreddit r/ontario in early August. “I know we have a good quality of life here, but it seems like we are a teacher strike away from being on our own.”
This is demonstrative of a large percentage of internet discussion, and probably conversations elsewhere, too. Unintentionally in most cases (most people are genuinely worried about the strain on public services), it echoes the basic precepts of the — at times militant — accelerationist perspective to which MacKenzie and others generally adhere: that the current system of liberal democracy is inherently corrupt and corrupted, verging on collapse, and that, in the extreme, its downfall can and should be hastened by acts of violence. Are we in decline? Only time can answer that. Post-COVID, the system does seem unsteady. Poilievre’s success to this point indicates that a non-insignificant number if Canadians — certainly Conservatives — are, consciously or otherwise, either turned to or fully buying into this meta narrative of decline or collapse. Which means plenty of are people vulnerable to deeper, darker rabbit holes, vulnerable to the most extreme version of this narrative.
In other words, if you focus on the bad, all you see is the bad, if you focus on the good, you will find the good. Our job is not to fight the bad, it is to shine the light of the good. Any idiot can tell me what I did wrong, but can he help me improve and do it right? A global company asked people in 9 developed countries: “Do you think the world is getting better or worse?” The most optimistic response was from Australia, where 18% of people thought things were getting better. In the USA it was 6%. A similar question was asked to developing countries. In China 80% of people believed the lives of younger people would be better than theirs. Similar optimistic response rate came from Brazil, Turkey and India. Why is this? Are lives becoming more miserable in Australia but much better in Turkey? Not really, but because people are feeling better there is a better chance that they will try harder to make life better. It is a virtuous, positive feedback cycle! Let’s take a step back: all I am writing was actually inspired by this quote by Erle c. Ellis, from a New York Times in 2013
“The idea that humans must live within our natural environmental limits of our planet denies the reality of our entire history and most likely our future… Our planet’s carrying capacity emerges from our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental conditions.”
As far as it goes, I agree. Hunter gatherers had a different carrying capacity than an agricultural society which is different again from ours. He wrote another article in 2018 which does admit to the fact that we are in crisis, which is great as it admits to reality, and once again he emphasizes that are limits are social and technological rather than “natural”:
The real question is how we better negotiate among ourselves, across all our many diverse peoples and cultures, so that we can navigate together toward the better futures we wish for, in our different ways. The problem is, what works for me will very likely not work for you. So by focusing on environmental limits instead of on the social strategies that enable better environmental and social outcomes, we fail to engage the only force of nature that can help us: human aspirations for a better future. We need to adjust our expectations. The new normal is not about staying within earth’s natural limits. We passed those long ago. It’s about winners and losers, and about navigating trade-offs and surprises. The human age will be no Eden or dystopia, but an everlasting struggle among different people seeking different futures. Who, for instance, will suffer from a hotter and less biodiverse planet, who will benefit and who will pay to avoid it entirely? And why haven’t we, the people, acted to solve the greatest environmental challenges of our time — global climate change, habitat loss and widespread extinctions? The greatest challenge of our time is not how to live within the limits of the natural world, or how to overcome such limits. It isn’t about optimizing our planet to better serve humanity or the rest of nature. To engage productively with the world we are creating, we must focus on strategies for working more effectively together across all of our diverse and unequal social worlds. If we truly intend to make this work, we need to leave behind treasured but outmoded beliefs in a stable balance of nature, unlimited human ingenuity and nonnegotiable environmental limits defined only by experts.
The Anthropocene is not the end of our world. It’s just the beginning. Collectively, we have the potential to create a much better planet than the one we are creating now. So let’s start talking about the better future we want, and less about the future we don’t.
This is all well and good. Hurray! However, to make this optimism actually happen in the messiness of the real world it must take place within limits. Lacking the concept that good can only happen within limits is what often turns optimism into naivete. Such happens when the author of the book I am reading [Lifespan, David Sinclair], who uses this quote to support his optimism says this, which for me, undermines his connection to reality:
“So when I consider the prospect of a more populated planet, it is far easier to envision one where more and more people are living better. The science compels me to dream this way.”
Therein lies the problem with optimism – it risks quickly decaying into delusional hope no longer grounded in the reality of the current situation. This kind of optimism only looks within its own bubble of facts and wears rose coloured glasses that block out the ugly truths of todays environmental collapse and social decay. So, I emphasize: my optimism is not delusional, it is practical and based upon real examples of real people, simple people like you and I, who did our little bit to improve things. Now, finally you now get to learn how all this has to do beavers.
Yes, without optimism we die. Without optimism we fail to see opportunities that are staring right at us. Yet optimism must exist within limits and be grounded in reality to “work”. Here is one such concrete example of people who are taking action today to improve the world for future generations and also non human life. It’s a simple story. Beavers are being brought back to the American southwest to protect the land from drought and fire. They do that simply by holding back the water with their dams. That way when there are the normal periodic flash floods the water is trapped and allows trees and grasses to be lush so that when the inevitable fire comes they are not burned up because they are so lush, for the quick moving fires will preferentially move to where the fuel is dry. This has the added benefit of bringing other life to the area and increasing the level of ground water as the water from the beaver ponds trickles slowly underground to replenish the water underground instead of rushing away as it had. So simple. Such a miraculous result. Watch this work here:
Beavers making desert areas drought and fire resistant.
Want to know the first person to do this? A Canadian trapper in central B.C. in the 1930s. His name was Eric Collier, and he became famous in the 1950s when he wrote Three Against the Wilderness. It is a recounting of his efforts to repopulate his trapping area with beavers to attract other fur bearing animals so that he could make a living as a trapper. His efforts were massively successful and improved the entire ecology of the area. If you want to learn more about how beavers are our best firefighter read the National Geographic article from the link below.
So, what can YOU do? Obviously, remain optimistic, no matter what. Look for and work for what will improve ALL life. Recognize challenges and human stupidity & greed – but don’t focus on it: all that will do is use valuable energy on negativity. Find like minded people and work on a project with them that will directly improve the lives of people or plants or animals or forests or lakes. And do all without becoming naïve. And finally, never forget that people just like you can accomplish seeming miracles, but only IF we face reality and then trust each other to work together towards the common goal of finding a way for humanity to live on the planet without destroying everything else around upon which we depend for our very survival.
References
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opinion/sunday/science-people-environment-earth.html
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beavers-firefighters-wildfires-california-oregon
https://theline.substack.com/p/colin-horgan-the-new-cpc-leader-speaks?utm_source=email
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