Introduction

A burgeoning population.  Increasing gaps between the rich and poor.  Dramatic climate change.  Corrupt political, cultural, and social systems.  The ubiquity of human-made chemicals in our everyday lives.  Staggering energy use.  This is a short and very incomplete list of problems that we humans face on a global scale.  Despite all of the modern world’s troubling problems, I’ve spent much of my life believing that we would find a way to make it through okay.  My childhood was ideal; I was non-religiously homeschooled, along with my three siblings, in the beautiful forests on the Ohio River near the small town of Madison, Indiana.  That all-too-distant childhood left me, as a fresh-faced young adult, full of wonder and fascination.  It also left me with hope and faith in humanity.  I believed that, for all of our ability to screw things up, we could also figure out how to fix the problems we had created.  I wanted to be part of that fix.  To that end, I continued down the path my parents had begun in my childhood and began my own simple, conscious lifestyle that grew into a small organization and became known as Wheels Of Change.  Several years later, I am beginning to see things much differently, and not necessarily for the good.  The wheels of change are still turning – just not quite in the overall direction I have long envisioned.  My intention in writing this essay is to lay out the facts as best as I can discern them, fill in the gaps with the most reasonable information available, face reality as it is, and come to the most logical conclusion possible, rather than simply go on believing that things will turn out okay just because I wish they would.  I will refrain from building an iron-clad case for things such as anthropogenic climate change and other culturally contentious ideas; I will include some evidence but if you still need convincing on basic, prevalent ideas, there are plenty of works out there that do so with rather unimpeachable evidence.  Here, I’m focusing instead on the chain of logic that stems from those realities, not the facts that lead to them.  Furthermore, what I’m postulating here is not wholly dependent on any one of those culturally contentious realities, but all of them together.

The Upshot: A Quick Synopsis

Since the beginning of human history, we as a species have faced two distinct categories of problems:  Those which affected small parts of the species (a relationship, a family, a tribe, a nationality, a village, a social class, or other localized distinction) and those which have affected humankind as a whole.  Problems of the former type have been much more plentiful.  Anything from personal relationship complications to sociopolitical power struggles to invading armies fall under this category.  The latter category, problems that affect humankind as a whole, have historically been the virtually exclusive domain of gigantic natural disasters or species-wide diseases.  For example, the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatau (also known as Krakatoa) was so violent as to literally change the globe’s climate drastically, affecting food supplies, with average weather patterns not returning until 1888.  Pandemics such as the infamous Black Death of the 14^th century also affected a huge percentage of the human population, affecting Asia, northern Africa, and the heavily-populated European continent.

Historically, the only human-caused problems we have faced have been relatively localized in nature.  The largest-scale human-caused problems through the 18^th century were military invasions, causing great distress and misfortune for the unlucky inhabitants of the country being invaded.  That we have historically ever only affected other humans relatively locally just goes to show our limited reach on the global scale.  Until very recently, societies around the world have been effectively isolated from one another, and a problem that affected one – be it disease, warfare, famine, politics, or whatever – probably didn’t affect another, excepting the general scenarios already stated above.  Given that this has been the case for at least 50,000 years of human development, we have evolved/adapted to the point where we only realize – genuinely think about or feel – how we affect other people on a personal scale.  In this sense, I’m defining ‘personal scale’ as our experience of self and all the various personal relationships we experience - romantic, family, friendship, neighbor, and to some extent, identification with a group (village, nation, religion, etc.).  I’m also defining this as relationships connected by time - relationships that happen within our lifetimes, as opposed to ones that do not (your great-grandchildren, for example – a relationship that is close in some respects but distant in time, and thus not part of your personal scale).  Overall I’ll call these our communal relationships.  Given that we realize communal relationships most fully, we tend to make proactive decisions based on these alone.

In our rapidly changing and increasingly global society, I believe that what we need is the ability to make supra-communal decisions – that is, we must be able to take actions based on how those actions will affect all people, here and there, in our life and outside of it, current and future, not just the people in our communal sphere¹.  And there’s the rub:  I am rapidly becoming convinced by evidence from all sectors that we are not capable of making those types of decisions.  Broadly speaking, the species-wide necessity of supra-communal decisions has never been more than theoretical until our particular moment in time.  The human experience has changed more since the Industrial Revolution than it did during the thousand years prior, and it continues to change at an ever-increasing pace.  This rapid pace of change is quite probably too fast for us to overcome tens of thousands of years of cultural and psychological evolution; by the time we finally take the necessary steps to deal with the new world we’re creating, it will likely be too late.  On a global scale, humanity has set many phenomena in motion – physical, societal, and beyond – that cannot be stopped on a dime.  The inertia of these phenomena will keep them rolling long after we have finally decided to take action to stop them.

Our everyday actions, and lack thereof, are having an impact on our world in what I see as three historically unprecedented ways:  Interpersonal, Ecological, and Personal.

Historically Unprecedented Impacts: Interpersonal

Since we are truly aware of only our communal relationships (supra-communal relationships are largely abstractly felt), we almost always make meaningful proactive decisions based on those relationships and how our decisions will affect them.  It is easy to see that our proactive response to problems in any sphere reflects the degree of our perceived connection or engagement with that sphere.  For example: If there is a problem in our family life, we make a strong attempt to fix it.  When our son/daughter/wife/husband has a problem, we sink much of our energy into fixing it, because the problem is very close to us.  If there’s a problem in our town, we probably make an attempt to fix it.  How strong this attempt is depends on how connected we consider ourselves with our town; in many small towns, you’ll find a degree of cohesiveness and cooperation unparalleled in most larger cities.  If there is a problem in our country, we may or may not make an attempt to fix it.  It depends on whether we identify our connections with fellow countrymen and women overall as communal.  Generally, even the most engaged patriot will put more feeling and energy into settling a dispute with his loved ones than settling a dispute between factions of government.

To further explore our strong attachment to communal relationships – and conversely, our almost-aversion to abstract supra-communal relationships such as global citizenship – we can turn to the concept of the Other.  Simone de Beauvoir, the 20^th century French philosopher and feminist, took Hegel’s psychological concept of the Other and put it to a more practical use by describing the common relationship between the sexes.  In her usage of the term, women were generally defined in their relationship to men - as other than men – rather than being defined on their own terms.  Rather than being seen as human in their own right, de Beauvoir claimed that women were being seen as somehow sub-human, and that was what made discrimination against them okay in the eyes of men - who admittedly kept women in more or less subservient standing at that time.  This usage of the Other was later applied to the people of occupied countries.  All philosophical jargon and history aside, it isn’t hard to see how the concept of the Other permeates human existence.  When people just like us can be made to seem completely unlike us – somehow less than human – then we no longer must care about them as human.  We’ve absolved ourselves of that responsibility.  The Other is what made American slavery possible; it is what allowed Nazi Germany to murder millions of Jews; it is what allows us to hear of horrific natural disasters in other countries and not feel all that sad; and on a lighter note, it’s what allows us to make jokes about the next state over.  The concept of the Other simply names our human propensity to consider people outside of our communal sphere as not personally meaningful.  At its best, this propensity is what allows us to carry on happily with our lives even in the face of global suffering – if we felt each and every injustice or death personally, we’d be permanently crippled with grief.  At its worst, this propensity gives us license to categorize entire cultures with slurs and destroy other people with a sense of personal ethical righteousness.

While in our modern and global society we have largely recognized that all humankind is indeed connected, this recognition is mostly abstract.  In everyday reality, we still go about our business with no real conception of all the impacts we create on humans around the planet – after all, we have thousands of years of human history that didn’t prepare us for the ability to, say, affect a child slaving in China by purchasing a cheap t-shirt twelve thousand miles away.  This abstract knowledge, without real everyday action stemming from it, illustrates our inability to genuinely think or act supra-communally; simply put, there are thousands of years behind us that taught us only what was necessary, which was that in any situation, the only human factors we had to worry about were our communal relationships, because those were the only human factors involved! 

The truth is much more complicated today: In the world we have created and now inhabit, the human factor in many decisions is multinational, multicultural, even multigenerational.  For example, take something as simple as shopping for groceries.  It’s a seemingly innocuous act – go to the store and pick up some food, right?  Not so fast.  We’re faced with a whole host of choices that have real effects on the real world.  What should we buy to eat?  SHOULD we buy to eat, or grow more food ourselves?  Organic or conventional?  Where should we go to procure food, a big box store, the local independent grocery, or the farmers market?  There’s a whole line of decisions to make, right up to the final question:  Paper or plastic?  Since we gravitate towards communal thought, we tend not to think about the larger implications of anything we do.  When we choose plastic bags, although we’ve heard they’re bad, it’s hard not to think “Well, it’s just a couple plastic bags.”  Unfortunately, taking a supra-communal viewpoint, it isn’t just a couple of plastic bags.  It’s a couple for every one of the millions of people that went to the grocery store today, and every single one of those billions and billions of plastic bags that are floating around out there will be here after our generation is dead.  The next generation, and the one after that, will have to deal with our affinity for the cheap and handy little plastic bag.  (Also unfortunately, paper’s not a whole bunch better – buried in a landfill without oxygen, the paper bag will simply remain intact as well.)  Or let’s take the organic/conventional food decision into account: Conventional is cheaper, and if (like me) you’re on a small budget and (unlike me) you don’t care about a little pesticide on your food, you might not see a problem with skipping the trendy organic section.  Of course, it isn’t just you that you’re making a decision for.  In part, when you buy (for example) a conventional bunch of bananas from Ecuador, you’re making a decision that affects not only you, but many people.  The conscious, proactive decision – to buy bananas to eat – is communal, it’s in your sphere.  But the unconscious, passive decision you’re making is supra-communal, whether you know or care or not.  The chain of impact is complicated and often tangential, but it is there:  The growers of the bananas are quite likely extremely underpaid and probably work under conditions that would appall you if your brother had the job, and they are very likely exposed to dangerous levels of pesticide with little or no protective equipment.  The plantation on which the bananas are grown is likely on ground that was originally rainforest but was slash-and-burn clear-cut, disabling a vital part of our planet’s natural carbon sequestration system and destroying biodiversity necessary to human survival.  The plane that flew those bananas from South America to North America put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than most individuals on the planet will in their lifetimes, and that CO2 will help change the planet’s climate for not only this generation, but for many to come.  The jet fuel the plane used is obviously a petroleum product, and oil reserves are a finite resource that humans wage wars over.  The system in place that allows bananas grown in Ecuador to be sold 48 hours later in a Wal-Mart in America is ridiculous from an economic standpoint alone, given how cheap that bunch of bananas was – without huge government subsidies and externalized costs all along the line, Ecuadorian bananas would not be economically feasible for you and me.  Government subsidies are a ludicrous idea with the national debt and deficit as high as they are, especially when subsidies often go to prop up either immensely profitable industries (oil) or ones that degrade our health, would fail without help, and should be left to fail (industrial corn).  But, as externalized costs are passed on to someone else or sometime else, the national debt and deficit can be passed on to the next generation – which is both someone, and sometime, else.

There are, of course, many more connections that could be made using that one small example.  There are even more examples that could be made using the grocery store scenario, and countless other everyday scenarios that we can imagine.  The point is that everything is connected, and that seemingly small decisions on our part have real effects on the world – human and otherwise.  If that one decision we made – to buy bananas, or to use plastic bags – was the only one like it, there wouldn’t be a problem.  The problem is that there are many, many people on this planet, all of whom are making decisions, big and small.  Even the smallest of seemingly small decisions have huge impacts overall once multiplied by our numbers as a species.  We cannot view our actions as standing alone, as something that only affects us and our small communal sphere; we must see beyond that barrier and realize that virtually every decision we make today has supra-communal implications, either on its own or in conjunction with millions of other decisions exactly like it.  Unfortunately, this is not something humans seem to be good at.

We are also not good at realizing when we – our very selves as a species! – are too much of a good thing.  Throughout the entire grand sweep of our history, we have lived by the same biological imperatives as all other living creatures: To create more of us.  This is so deeply ingrained as to be manifested in religious beliefs – be fruitful and multiply!  It’s so deeply ingrained that even when faced with the reality of too many people on this planet, we refuse (or are unable) to change our thinking about having children.  Projections show that by 2050 we will be nine billion strong on planet Earth – three times as many people as in 1950.  I’ll share some reasons why we cannot sustain this many people in the next section; for now, let me just say that without a doubt, we are too many.  We have, in some respects at least, transcended our purely biological nature.  Our biological nature is to procreate plentifully, creating a natural defense against extinction.  We’ve fought tooth and nail to stay alive all through our history, just as other animals do.  But in this modern world, we hardly need to fight tooth and nail to survive as a species, and since we are now plentiful, we don’t need to worry about losing the next generation to attrition.  In fact, we’ve crossed the line of our biological nature and pushed so far beyond we’ve inverted the purpose: We are hard-wired to procreate to ensure the survival of the species, but now that very action is one of the things threatening our survival!  We’ve certainly not transcended our biology completely, for if we had, we’d recognize the need to rein in growth.  Our population problem comes from the evolutionary communal viewpoint, and only from a supra-communal perspective can we realize the solution, which of course is creating fewer children.  In this, I am fairly convinced, we will remain trapped by our own biology.

Now, in our new global system, any action we take may have a greater number of unintended and unknown effects, and on the most far-flung people, than ever before.  The more we progress – and I use that word simply in the linear sense, with no inherently positive value in it – the more potential we each have to affect other people, other nations, and other generations with every choice we make.  These are truly historically unprecedented impacts, and unfortunately, our disinterest in affirming that those impacts are positive will be part of our undoing.  When we make a decision, it often has supra-communal impacts, regardless of whether we take those criteria into account.  This passive and unrecognized decision-making on the supra-communal scale more often than not harms other people – often tangentially, but actually.  Not only that, but it harms our home planet; that’s what we’re looking at next.

Historically Unprecedented Impacts: Ecological

Environmentalism has rapidly grown in prominence since the late sixties.  Today, being ‘green’ is a subculture in its own right, and the green movement has definitely influenced the mainstream.  However, what we see overall is little of consequence and a whole lot of fluff.  The supra-communal environmental problems we have are partially acknowledged, but the reaction is almost always entirely communal: Faced with massive depletion of natural resources, we aren’t encouraged to really cut down on resource usage, but to take the “101 Ways to be Green” or other vapidly-named magazine article to heart.  True lifestyle change isn’t really discouraged – it just isn’t even talked about in our culture, a fate worse than discouragement.  Instead, some of us just make sure we’re green enough to be considered caring and interested by our contemporaries, a communal-sphere criteria (you know it’s become ‘cool’ to be green when, as an acquaintance told me some time ago, Whole Foods is “the place to be seen these days”).  Some of us just scoff at the whole environmentalism idea.  Meanwhile, we humans continue to have huge negative impacts on the only place we have to call home – Earth.  Take an example that the vast majority of us can connect with: Our cars.

Every day, millions of Americans drive their automobiles.  The car (and lately, the big truck/Hummer/SUV) is undeniably a huge force in American culture.  As I’ve written on the Wheels Of Change website², we Americans are 4.5% of the global population, yet we use 44% of all the gasoline produced on the planet.  We use cars for 90% of all our trips, and 66% of those trips are running around town.  Forty percent of all auto trips are less than two miles long.  Sixty percent of a car’s pollution happens in the first few minutes of operation, before the engine and catalytic converter warm up.  The story is there for the reading – many of our trips by car are short, stop-n-go affairs, which are also the trips that cause the most pollution.  These are also, coincidentally, the trips that we could most easily replace by cycling or walking.  Now there’s a prime example of denial of supra-communal needs in favor of communal desires: The car trips that cause the most pollution are the ones we could most easily replace with other, non-polluting methods of transport.  Yet we don’t; thinking communally (I/we will just jump in the car and drive down to the store), we disregard the supra-communal (my car is very inefficient on short drives like the trip to the store – maybe I’ll just walk or ride my bike instead).

Anyone who’s ever seen Los Angeles knows the visible effects of too many cars.  For those of us that don’t live in a huge city, we still know that our cars pollute our planet.  LA is just an easily-accessible example of what one small communal decision looks like once multiplied by the supra-communal multitudes.  Well, picture the American communal sphere multiplied by the global supra-communal multitudes.  Take China³, for example.  As of 2003 – after a 332% increase in the number of cars since 1990 - their automobile ownership levels were still 78 times less than ours per capita.  However, their economy is rising fast and the Chinese people are chomping at the bit of Westernization.  If their automobile ownership levels matched ours, there would be 900 million cars on China’s roads – which is 40% more than the current global total.  If China’s per capita oil consumption were to match ours, Chinese demand for oil would outstrip current global production by 18%. 

Consider the impact all of this would have on our planet.  We Americans, 4.5% of the global population, use 26% of all the energy produced on the globe.  This means we use five times more than our share. If even one large country like China or India began living our lifestyles, there wouldn’t be any energy or resources left over for the rest of us!  (That is, if production remained at the same levels.  Of course production would rise to some degree, but let’s not fool ourselves – the planet only has so much to give, and we are already pushing the limits.)  This mind-boggling conundrum is only one small example of the results of actions we all take using only communal criteria when there are huge supra-communal issues to take into consideration.  It gets even more worrisome when we factor in the globe’s burgeoning population.

As I mentioned earlier, the human population is projected to be nine billion by 2050.  This is amazing enough, considering that in 1950 we were not quite three billion strong, and here in 2010 we’re pushing seven billion.  What’s scarier, however, is the strong trend towards American lifestyles in developing countries.  As Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman delineates in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, our problems would be big enough if we were just faced with a 40% population increase in the next 40 years.  But when we begin to look at the realities of the trend towards American lifestyles, we see that on average each of those newcomers to our world will be consuming or attempting to consume much more than the people before them.  The planet is simply not capable of providing that many resources, or of absorbing the increased waste that would result.  The average American lives a lifestyle that, if everyone on the planet lived the same way, would require five Earths to sustain.  Even looking past the fact that this is not equitable in any sense of the word (don’t we Americans believe in the equality of all humans?), the sheer physical reality of it is that our planet can’t take much more.  Virtually everything we look at tells the same story – automobile usage, destruction of wilderness, loss of biodiversity, pollution in our water, dirt, and air, energy production, and, yes, ‘global warming’.

Obviously there’s quite a debate in our culture right now about anthropogenic climate change, or what’s generally known as ‘global warming’.  According to the latest surveys (January 2010), fewer Americans (57%) believe in anthropogenic climate change than did just over a year ago, in October 2008 (71%).  Besides suggesting that a substantial percentage of Americans’ opinions are easily swayed, that survey shows that even in the face of overwhelming evidence, people will deny reality if it is expedient to do so.  Reality denied: Not only do we know that carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are rising at an unprecedented rate (it has risen this much in the Earth’s history, but never this fast), we can date the carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere, and this tells us that the new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being created by us.  We are creating this CO2 primarily through the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.  Expediency: Doing something about ‘global warming’ requires big lifestyle changes on the part of humankind, and especially Americans.  Rather than even think about what this might entail, many people would rather just believe that everything is fine as it is, even when the facts to the contrary are staring

them in the face.

But if people still refuse to accept anthropogenic climate change as fact, well, there are many other ecological disasters happening right now that are less easily denied.  After all, when we are told that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising, it’s a pretty abstract idea.  If we are told that 3600 acres of forests are cleared for development every single hour, it’s much more tangible, although when it’s happening in Indonesia and the Amazon it doesn’t have quite the same impact that it would were it happening in your backyard.  And when it is in our backyards – well, that’s when we begin to see action.  When the banks of the Ohio are littered with trash in Madison, Indiana, it is the citizens of the town who come out and clean it up.  When the residents of Pueblo, Colorado, have to deal with sewage effluent from Colorado Springs in the Arkansas River watershed, they all turn out to be environmentalists to some degree.  In another, more ironic example, when the snow base at Colorado’s ski resorts ends up much thinner than normal for several years in a row, skiers and resorts band together to “Save Our Snow”, to use a name loosely affiliated with such efforts.

Such examples show yet again the contrast between communal and supra-communal decisions and actions.  Any global problem is so abstract – so supra-communal – as to be easily ignored by most of us.  Even less-abstract problems such as intense deforestation and loss of necessary biodiversity don’t really have an impact on us so long as they are in the supra-communal sphere.  We must have a problem in our communal sphere – our town, our sport, our backyard – before we make a decision to act on it.

What we need is to understand that in our new global society, everywhere is effectively our backyard.  No longer can we make the mistaken assumption that if it happens elsewhere, it’s not affecting us.  With this many people on our planet, connected in all the myriad ways we are today, everything that happens with any degree of regularity will be manifested globally.  And that brings us to the next way we’re having an impact without realizing it: We’re affecting ourselves.

Historically Unprecedented Impacts: Personal

We’ve looked at a few of the many ways that our ultimately short-sighted decisions affect other people – people in other cultures, countries, socio-economic brackets, and even generations.  We’ve also looked briefly at the way our actions affect our planet, and of course that affects us all as well.  But beyond those effects, we have one more major area of impact, one that should really shake us out of our stupor.  We’re affecting ourselves, quite literally and quite personally.  There is serious scientific speculation that the current generation of young adults is the first generation since the advent of modern medicine whose life expectancy will decrease⁴.  Taking a closer look at today’s world, our generation is probably also the first in quite a while which will experience a decrease in quality of life (traditionally measured, anyway) and decrease in overall cultural/social stability.  While the life expectancy speculation is based mostly on the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ and its detrimental effect on physical health⁵, the others that I’ve thrown out there are based on much broader grounds. 

We already wage war, official and unofficial, over resources such as oil and other profitable commodities.  What will happen in the next 50 years, as humans become more plentiful and use more resources per capita?  In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, vice president of the World Bank, said, “If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water.”⁶  There will be war over water.  War over open space.  War over food.  In fact, there have already been documented recent food riots in third-world areas around the globe.  As those vital resources become ever more scarce, we will have to make do with less.  And when some less – probably a good thing for us Americans – becomes too much less, our health, happiness, and security will suffer.

Chronic diseases have been on the rise in America for the past two decades at the least.  Cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cardiovascular diseases are becoming more common.  Obesity is obviously becoming more common (a third of Americans are obese and two-thirds overweight).  Poorly understood syndromes such as autism and celiac disease are affecting increasing numbers of people.  While it is possible that some of the observed increase in any of these is due to improvements in diagnostic practice, it isn’t likely that the entire increase can be thus attributed.  It is difficult to consider the thousands of years we lived through as a species without the benefit of modern medicine, and then compare that to our current health situation.  What is to blame for all of this?  After all, we appear to have temporarily defeated many of the feared diseases of old; polio, tuberculosis, malaria, and the like.  But the same world that brought us cures for those – the world created via the Industrial Revolution – may have also brought us a way of life that is self-destructive in the long term.  Is it really that far out there to just consider the possibility that the world we’ve created is not necessarily completely good?  Is it completely off the wall to consider the possibility that the modern world we surround ourselves with could be to blame for the inexplicable rise in chronic disease and mystery syndromes?  I don’t think so.

Given the rising rates of disease currently and its corresponding prevalence among our older citizens, the seniors of today are very likely reaping what they unwittingly helped sow in post-WWII America.  But it goes much deeper than physical afflictions.  As Thomas Friedman notes, the ‘Greatest Generation’ built the national infrastructure upon which we now depend (as he also notes, we depend upon it without adding much to it or even maintaining it well, which is another perfect example of our lack of foresight).  What they also built is a way of life that doesn’t work, long-term, for the human species.  What we take for granted in 2010 will not be realistically possible for most people in the near future.  Some things already aren’t: The quintessential American dream - a house to call your own, two cars in the garage, and a white picket fence - is getting more and more difficult for average Americans to attain.  We take our levels of energy use for granted.  This level of use will not be possible – at least not at an affordable price – in only a couple decades, barring any unforeseen revolutionary energy technology.  The Social Security/Medicare system which we take for granted is on a downhill slide and it is currently taking our entire nation’s financial future with it.  Our national debt, once you factor in actual future obligations, is over 56 trillion dollars.  Currently, there is no plan in place to deal with this problem, but you can be sure that eventually - probably in our lifetimes - we will begin to see the fallout from this lack of financial foresight.  Excessive consumerism is taken for granted.  The near future will show us why living to consume is not a healthy or viable lifestyle, personally and as a nation.  In the last half of the 20^th century we have come to overly rely on antibiotics and other medicines as if they were cure-alls.  Now we’re beginning to see ‘superbugs’, drug-resistant strains of diseases we thought we’d taken care of – XXDR-TB (tuberculosis), for example.  Our world today is full of wired and wireless devices and people living and dying (texting, anyone?) by them.  Only very recently we’ve begun to see serious questions emerge about the almost omnipresent ‘electrosmog’ and its effects on our bodies⁷.  Our very global society, which we take for granted, is grounded on the concept of perpetual growth, a model which has never succeeded - growth requires input of resources, and resources on the globe are finite.  We’ve filled our lives with conveniences of every sort, but in the long run it’s beginning to look like we may only be killing ourselves softly.

All the things just mentioned aren’t merely abstract ideas.  These are realities, things that are happening – things that are genuinely affecting or will affect you and me personally.  They are supra-communal in that they affect everyone, but in the end they are communal-sphere problems.  The decisions we personally make day-to-day are truly helping create the very problems that will impact our personal lives.  Unfortunately, we aren’t good at seeing this.  Even within our own lifetimes, the time span can be large enough that we don’t make sound long-term decisions.  Just as the smoker who goes through two packs a day, knowing the risks, is still surprised and crushed when diagnosed with cancer, we continue down our self-destructive paths, waiting for the hammer to fall.  I am no exception.

The Unique Crisis at Hand & Where’s it All Headed?

So, let’s summarize: It’s extremely difficult for us to make proactive supra-communal decisions, and this is affecting us in three major ways – interpersonally, ecologically, and personally.  The problem with being hard-wired to effectively ignore the world at large is that we are all suddenly, for the first time in history, being required to make supra-communal decisions.  This is not hyperbole.  At quite literally no other time in history has the average human (especially Western-world citizens) had the ability to have such a huge impact on the world, human or otherwise.  As it stands, our world has some immensely troubling issues that must be addressed if we are to thrive or possibly even survive as a species.  This brings us to the all-important question: Can we overcome thousands of years of evolutionary history (or, if you prefer, the divine engineering of our beings)?  Can we break out of our communal patterns of thought and become not only supra-communally aware, but supra-communally proactive? 

There is a difference between the two.  Even among people who are aware of supra-communal issues, the communal instinct is so strong that it can cause a great disconnect.  This disconnect between communal and supra-communal is sublimely illustrated in a story from 2005.  Robert Kennedy Jr., the famous environmentalist and Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council, has spent years working on big environmental issues⁸.  He is a supporter of renewable energy projects, including wind power.  However, in 2005, he came out in strong opposition to a proposed offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound, in Massachusetts.  Though he had many arguments against it – most of which were easily answered – he left out one inconvenient factor, the one that very probably caused his opposition: The Kennedy family property in Hyannis Port was within easy viewing distance of the proposed wind farm.  It is easy to call this a simple case of petty selfishness, but I think it runs much deeper than that – it is the denial of acknowledged supra-communal needs in favor of communal desires.  That level of disconnect shows something powerful at work, something we would do well to learn about and begin trying to work around.  Our success as a species depends on it.

There are two types of people who don’t proactively address supra-communal needs.  On one hand, there are people who are completely or mostly unaware of the supra-communal, people who don’t see any problems with their current lifestyles in a holistic sense.  I would submit that a large percentage of Americans fall within this category.  On the other hand, we have people who clearly see at least some of the supra-communal issues we face, yet submit to communal desires instead.  The Kennedy example above is such a case.  Another example is the politician who, knowing the right thing to do for the country and its direction, does whatever is politically expedient instead, chasing those poll numbers.  There are varying degrees of this latter type, of course – while Kennedy’s wind farm opposition and the politician may be on the negligent end of the ethical scale, there are other times that ignoring the supra-communal needs are necessary.  Can the construction worker who must drive an hour to work in order to support his family really refuse to do just that?  None of us have the broad sweep of vision necessary to make no wrong decisions.

One thing is certain: Publicly-lauded efforts to ‘do the right thing’ which only serve to absolve our guilt will never even begin to solve our problems.  The unaware person who uses plastic bags at the grocery store may be contributing to a problem, but the aware person who uses canvas bags without making any sort of fundamental lifestyle change is really just trying to bail out the Titanic with a teaspoon.  These sorts of feel-good actions are dangerous – they convince us that we’re doing our part, when all we’re doing is closing our eyes and refusing to look at the pile of problems that’s about to topple (indeed, that’s toppling) on our heads.

We need to make a clean break with our old ways of thinking, being, and decision-making.  We must truly become aware of supra-communal issues and use that criteria, along with our communal criteria, to make decisions big and small.  We must have the ability to adapt to the changes in the world around us.  To repeat the question above: Can we break out of our communal patterns of thought and become not only supra-communally aware, but supra-communally proactive?  And to add to it: Can we break out in time to avoid catastrophic consequences, both slow and quick, apparent and insidious, that will threaten our collective contentedness and possibly even our collective survival?

My answer to those questions is pretty simple.  I believe that we probably can’t.  Mind you, this is not what I’d like to think.  I’d very much prefer to believe that we will find that safe passage through this crisis.  Virtually every book out there right now that you’ll find talking about these sorts of problems ends on a hopeful note – I’m not positive whether to think it’s because the authors know no one will buy their book if it doesn’t, or if the authors themselves very much prefer to believe we’ll be okay.  But a long, thoughtful look at the world today, taking in evidence from many areas of life – scientific, economic, cultural, social, historical, projected, and just plain observing as life goes by – doesn’t, for me, bring the happy ending.  The world we have created over the past couple hundred years has changed too much, too fast, with too many far-reaching consequences we’re just beginning to learn about.  We humans can certainly adapt.  But I don’t think we can adapt fast enough to deal with what we’ve created.  It’s not just adapting to a new technology, or adapting to a new resource.  We now need to change our entire way of looking at the world.  We are unprepared by evolution to respond to global problems of our own making – we have the same response as if the global problem were natural; that is, no proactive response.

Perhaps one of the most disturbing things about this whole concept is that it is not enough to be personally aware of and proactive in the supra-communal sphere.  As Americans, we enjoy the idea of individuality – if we want to change something, well, we can do it on our own.  However, that’s just not true in this case.  In order for our global systems to change, a huge percentage of our global population must change.  We ourselves as individuals virtually can’t even change thoroughly enough without new systems in place on which to rely.  Regardless of how aware we may be, it is all but impossible to distance ourselves from every problematic system currently in place.  We are faced not with an individual choice to do things differently, but with a collective choice.  Look around – do you see the realistic makings of a collective choice for genuinely meaningful change in the time frame necessary?

What To Do?

I do not write all of this as a doomsday pessimist.  I am not attempting to frighten anyone into action, and I am certainly not attempting to frighten anyone into apathy!  I am not trying to join the petty culture of fear that permeates much of our country.  In daily life, I’m a simple, thoughtful, contented and realistic person.  I have no interest in misleading anyone, nor do I wish to attract ‘followers’.  I am simply putting forth a view of the world as I see it.  If I’m attempting to accomplish anything, it is twofold:  1. To use the written word as a cathartic device, organizing what’s in my head, and 2. To perhaps encourage others to take a look at the world around them, measure it through the lens of realism, and figure out where it’s left wanting.  I personally believe that knowledge for its own sake is worthwhile, so even if I believe I can’t do anything about the state of the world, I still want to know the true state of the world.

I know some people believe that thinking of things such as I’ve written here engenders nothing but despair.  Well, don’t despair, even if you agree with what I’m postulating.  I don’t despair (most of the time), even though I think through all of this, precisely because I am human and am for better or worse endowed with the ability to forget or ignore the big picture!

Regardless of whether or not we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, so to speak, I still believe personal actions are worthwhile.  As Michael Pollan says in his essay Why Bother?, the reason for doing something you believe in is less about the actual change it will make and more about how it fits into the world you envision around yourself.  In order to keep from getting too discouraged, however, remember that most proactive personal actions, like passive communal decisions, only matter once they’re multiplied by the population at large.  I may prefer to ride my bicycle almost everywhere, and I will continue to do just that even in the face of a country that’s in love with internal/infernal combustion, but I have no illusions that my bicycle riding will ever make a difference.  It matters not – I will do it because I want to live in a world where it would.

At the end of the day, we’re all just human.  We have to realize that we’re not perfect in any sense of the word.  We’re not perfectly logical, or the last paragraph would be completely inane (maybe it is).  We’re not perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves, personally or collectively, communally or supra-communally.  We’re not perfectly sure where we’re headed – we’re just heading somewhere, into the future, as fast as our latest inventions and schemes can take us, even if it is a little too fast for due diligence.  We’re quite possibly not perfectly capable of surviving as a species.  But then again, neither have most of the species to have ever existed on our planet.  When we are gone, this planet will still be here.  The solar system will still be here.  Our galaxy, the universe, and whatever lies beyond will still be here.  All of our follies and triumphs will be forgotten and meaningless, and perhaps something new will take our place, something that will repeat the cycle.  Perhaps the cycle itself is the only thing that is truly perpetual.  As a human, I enjoy having at least that one comforting thought.  And that’s what allows me to sleep at night.

Footnotes:

1. I also believe that we have the responsibility to make supra-communal decisions based on supra-human criteria – that is, I think the natural world, from other species to inanimate objects, deserves respect from us on a varying scale.  However, for the purposes of this essay, I decided to keep the argument centered around we humans and how we are affecting ourselves.

2. All of the statistics cited through the next footnote: http://wheelsofchange.net/content/autoaddiction.htm

3. All of the statistics cited through the remainder of the paragraph:

http://wheelsofchange.net/content/energyuse.htm

4. http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/briefs/publichealth/hb050317a.htm

5. It should be noted that obesity in America has many causes, many of which have to do with precisely the sort of problems we need to deal with on the global scale.  Our food supply system, our dependency on chemical and other nutritionally poor ingredients in modern food, our cultural structure – all of these are problematic.  Thus, there is a fairly direct connection between “Obesity may cause a decrease in life expectancy for Americans” and the overall theme here.

6. Shiva, Vandana, Water Wars

7. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34509513/ns/health-cancer/

8. It is interesting to note, on a more subtle scale, how little Kennedy’s personal life reflects the values he supposedly reflects in the professional world.  In the same way that Al Gore made An Inconvenient Truth while living in a 10,000-square-foot mansion that uses, according to the AP, at least 15 times more electricity than the national home average, Kennedy argues for environmental causes while flying about in a personal jet, accepting income from family-owned oil businesses, and raising six children.  Rather than trying to skewer Kennedy for hypocrisy – after all, we all have some level of hypocrisy in our lives – I’m simply pointing out, once again, the disconnect between supra-communal needs and communal actualities.