Convenience and a Caveat

Benjamin Franklin once wrote,” …in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”   I do not argue with Mr. Franklin, but I would add one more thing.  Change is a certainty in life.  It surrounds us, and no matter how much we resist, it happens.    Not all of us are happy with that, though.  Change is often uncomfortable, and many notice with trepidation that change does not always seem under our control, even if we can influence it.  However, I would posit that one of the greatest factors that elicit people to resist change is inconvenience.    One example is climate change.  Embracing the change needed to ameliorate the potential disaster is an awesome, far-reaching task, requiring massive lifestyle changes, and is certainly not convenient.  Even the title of Al Gore’s book on the subject is “An Inconvenient Truth”.

At least here in the United States, and I would guess, among the moderately well off elsewhere, we have been raised to expect that life will be convenient.  Life should be pleasurable, as consistently happy as possible.  We should not be expected to take responsibility for what might cause us expense, extra effort, possible sorrow or pain.  We pay insurance companies to “protect” us from all that.  We litigate at the drop of a hat to place responsibility upon someone else, who should then pay to restore our happiness.  We eat pre-prepared foods to spare ourselves the effort of cooking.  We expect that schools and daycare centers should raise our children to be whatever we want them to be, but most of all, to give us no trouble when we come home tired from work.  Learning should be fun, hence effort-free, and it’s someone else’s job to make it so.  We should no longer be inconvenienced to learn grammar or spelling or even common arithmetic facts, because the computer will do all that.  Handwriting skills are a chore from the past because we have word processors and printers.   “Progress”, it seems, is almost synonymous with “convenience”.

Marketers are well aware of this phenomenon.  Products are designed to help us do less and less and think less and less, and the advertisements for these products emphasize in one way or another how convenient they are.   Classes in writing emphasize not grammar or varied vocabulary, but that we must make our writing convenient to read, requiring little or nothing of the readers.  It is almost as if the readers were considered to be a bit retarded.  Politicians make it as convenient as possible to agree with them, using convenient social media, convenient memes, convenient platitudes, convenient TV ads, and convenient means to donate (with a click.)    Thinking is not really required. Those who wish to discourage voting begin by making it inconvenient to vote.  Finances can now be done conveniently online, without the effort of keeping accounts or writing checks.   And so it goes.

It feels good when something is convenient, and sometimes convenience is immensely helpful to the accomplishment of a larger goal.  Like most things, though, convenience can be overdone.  In excess, it does not empower us; it effectively weakens us, leaving us less able to do the things which we have abandoned to our convenience.  There is strength in being able to chop firewood, wash dishes, cook, write, figure in our heads, read and understand deep material, have legible penmanship, grow our food, know something about our health and healing, create our own entertainment, talk in person with one another – the list can go on and on.  When those strengths are taken from us by various means to provide our convenience, we are in fact disempowered.  Sadly, such is the attraction of convenience that most of us are unaware that we have been disempowered.

We are at a time in history when change is happening more quickly and more drastically than before, creating chaos around it.    It is most certainly inconvenient.  If we have been permeated by the expectation of convenience, we will be effectively edged out of the conversation about change by blindly following whatever ideas seem to be the most convenient.  Not all those convenient changes lead to the best ends, but if we have been desensitized to this concept, we will be unaware.  Sometimes the energy of going through inconvenience – whether physical or the effort of thinking deeply – is the energy taking us to the places we need to be.  The inconvenient efforts of adapting to climate change is a large example of this, but the same pattern applies to more personal and individual changes as well. 

Let us form the habit of questioning our convenience.   Is the easiest way really the best way to guide our affairs?  Sometimes it is.  It is needful, though, to recognize when it is not.  If we wish to retain the power of guiding our own lives and influencing the grander changes around us, we must not give primary importance to convenience.  Let us not allow enshrined convenience to blind us when change comes knocking at the door.  We need our awareness and discretion.

Peace, Diane

The Gift of Being Alone

Humans are a gregarious species.  We have a hard-wired desire to belong to a community or tribe or a group of friends.  We often choose to work in teams, partnerships or companies.  Expulsion from the group or being ignored is a painful experience which can be used to keep members of a group on an accepted path.  Children form bonds within a classroom setting, and recreation or free play is often a group affair.  Truly, we are gregarious, even though many of us need a certain amount of alone time to recharge.

However, we also live in a world of dualities, a world in which paradox is common enough to often pass unobserved.  Look deeply enough, and opposites are linked together in a common continuum, each opposite being true at the same time.   Sometimes we can find the linking thought, the balance; when we do, we are better off for the discovery.  Heads and tails are parts of the same coin.  Sorrow and joy enhance each other, deepening the experience of each.

It follows that being a gregarious species in a world of paradox, we are also quite alone.   Yes, we bond together in groups, desire the company of each other; even more than the company, we desire to be known by another.  We want someone else to understand and hopefully appreciate us. Sometimes, in the closest of relationships, we come close to that.  Yet, even when we are that lucky or successful, we encounter times when it seems that amidst even a multitude, we are completely alone.

In a broad sense, we are never alone; we are all connected in the mystical common web of things, all parts of the original energy of the One.  Some have perceived this mystical energy as holographic, i.e., the total of everything is contained within each part.  In this sense, we are always connected.  It is also true that in order for there to be a universe of entities distinct from each other, instead of a fused glob of energy, there need be boundaries.   Boundaries set us apart from not-us and allow us to exist as individual conscious beings.  They also ensure that we are alone.    We are both alone and connected.

Alone can feel lonely, but it does not need to.  Lonely is having lost sense of one’s connection to the whole, feeling abandoned and vulnerable.  Alone is the realization of one’s uniqueness, knowing that no matter how well we may communicate, no one else can truly understand the fullness of our being, know exactly what we experience or feel.   No other being can make our life’s decisions for us; no other being can take responsibility for those decisions.   If we allow, we may be influenced by others, but the decisions are ours.  Alone is accepting that realization, and simultaneously enjoying the cosmic connection that is our heritage.   Alone is seeing and comprehending the paradox; lonely is seeing only one end.

Some humans prefer to work by themselves instead of in groups; other humans feel a need for more alone time than their peers, desiring time in nature or their favorite retreat.   Even those humans, some strongly inclined to isolation, need connection.  Most of us need that connection with other humans; a few find it in nature, animal friends or prayer.  It is still connection.  At the same time, it is essential, especially for those on the more communal end of the spectrum, to realize their own awareness as unique.  We are a paradox.  For most of us, the alone end of the phenomenon is most difficult to accept. Eventually, even the company, stimulation, adulation (or condemnation) of others falls hollow, until acceptance of aloneness enables our return to connection.

Let us then celebrate with, enjoy and love each other.   Let us also allow ourselves to experience the paradox and find time for solitude and the consciousness of our complete aloneness.  Let us appreciate both the aloneness and the connection, nurturing our wholeness in the process.   Alone is our beginning, leading us back into connectedness in an endless circle.   Alone need not be scary when we embrace it.

Peace, Diane

The Earth Belongs to All of Us

In a  recent opinion article in the April 5th issue of the digital version of YES Magazine, David Korten wrote about how preoccupation with labels such as socialism, capitalism, or communism are warping understanding of efforts to address climate change, specifically of efforts to address climate change via the bill for the Green New Deal.  (In the digital version, the article may be located by first clicking on the article “How Tribes Are Harnessing Cutting Edge Data to Plan for Climate Change” and then locating the Korten essay on the sidebar.) 

Mr. Korten writes, “Our living spaceship is dying by our hand, and there are no escape capsules, and no place to go if there were.”   This avowed critic of current capitalism then proceeds to explain how the verbal throwing around of political labels clouds the meaning of the bill, and often blocks any progress to be made on the subject of climate change.   He then continues that he concluded that economic and political labels are useless to finding answers ” because it was clear that neither socialism nor communism in their commonly understood expressions offered a solution.”  He also suggests why those currently in power may be clinging to labels, not realizing that the situations are not the same as they once were. “The world of my earlier years has changed beyond recognition. The Soviet Union, along with its celebration of armed revolution and the collapse of its self-proclaimed dictatorship of the proletariat, disintegrated almost 30 years ago. The Russia that has emerged is an unabashed capitalist dictatorship of the mafia. China’s Communist party now rules the world’s most aggressive and successful capitalist economy. And in the United States, the middle class is disappearing as the division between rich and poor becomes ever more extreme…..I sense the public may be ready for a thoughtful search for solutions that link public and private initiative beyond the grand labels—a search reflected in the substance of the Green New Deal.’

I was moved by Mr. Korten’s communication. There is a certain frustration in watching our leaders do almost anything other than concretely address the climate crisis we have been entering and in which we currently find ourselves.  Children call out and demonstrate, missing school to do so (a true function of youth, to call attention to what needs be addressed) while many of our elders who are in leadership positions either condemn the children’s protests or ignore them.  A function of elders is to address the issues that youth highlight, and our leaders are failing to do this.  A similar response is given to the protests of environmentalists, indigenous peoples, and interested citizens, such as family farmers, naturalists, ranchers and lovers of nature.  That we need to move on the issue of climate change, and the corresponding socio-economic issues, is obvious.

Of course, the Green New Deal is not the only solution offered to address climate change; the issue has many factors, not all addressed in this one article by Mr. Korten. One such issue is the ownership of land. In the Spring 2019, #182 issue of the Communities Magazine, (www.ic.org ) Cassandra Ferrera comes to the conclusion that the ages old concept of land ownership is also a social building block which has contributed to not only climate change, but to the current social and economic injustices of our time.  

The concept and structures of land ownership have been with us for a long time.  The social and political structures of the Middle Ages are a good example; most of the land was owned by the nobility, almost none of whom personally worked the land.  The land was worked by those who did not own it and who did not benefit from it.  They were essentially slaves, although they were not called that; they were labeled as serfs.  However, land ownership and the unequal distribution of land and the benefits of its productivity were there long before the Middle Ages, in cultures in Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

 Indigenous people did not have a concept of land ownership.  To them, the land could not be owned – it was considered the mother of people, animals, plants, life on Earth, and as such, did not have an owner.  People worked the land that was near them, but they did not own the land.  Produce of the land was shared, and the land itself worked in such a way as to care for it.  Mother Earth provided her human and non-human children with all they needed to sustain life.  

When their land was conquered by settlers, who claimed land belonged exclusively to individuals among themselves, native peoples not only lost the sustenance of Mother Earth, they also felt the deep grieving pain of that loss and of the way the Earth was being treated.  The way we treat our Earth, without respect and with the attitude of conquering it and forcing it to produce for our exclusive benefit and according to our dictates, has created the crisis we call climate change.  If we are to address the crisis, we must abandon the idea that we own and can dictate to the Earth.  Ms. Ferrera writes, “Ultimately we must pull apart the concepts that are bundled into the legal fiction we call private property ownership and address the questions of power, responsibility, equity, security and legacy.”

So how are we to live, if we cannot own land??   Our entire social structure, equitable or not, is based on the ownership of land.  We cannot even have a home unless we pay someone who owns the land (developer, landlord, government) for the privilege of living on it.  Our urban communities are not designed to preserve or cooperate with the land, or with each other either, for that matter.  Our rural areas are often owned by huge corporations, whose care for the land is minimal, if at all.  We have with our ownership polluted the land, water and air, and birthed for ourselves mutagenic foods, new diseases, and ongoing anxieties.   However, if we cannot own land, then how will we live?

It seems to me that the only way to do that is to hold the land in common, to live in groups small enough for everyone to know everyone else and to make common decisions, and for the land on which we live to be in the protective custody of those who live upon it.  We must be stewards of the lands upon which we live, not conquerors and despoilers.  Should we despoil our own nest, we may not take the nests of others for ourselves.   The Earth is given to people to sustain them; this relationship also requires that they care for the Earth.  This is the message we seem to have forgotten, perhaps in our mad rush to embrace the newest and best technology.  However, technology cannot replace the land, although, used correctly, it may help us to nurture the Earth.

Spring is here.  It is the time of new life.  Let us then ponder how the concept of the commonly-held nature of land, and how the political innovations of the young can help us restore the life to our planet, which is in danger of losing that life.  The planet itself, including all that live on it, is an endangered species.   Let us attempt to restore it. 

Peace, Diane

Water is Life

Some time ago – what seems like a long time ago, but in reality is not so far removed – the news was full of the actions of a combined group of people, led by Native Americans, who called themselves the Water Protectors.  Their driving truth was, “Water is Life.”   They were encamped in a place called Standing Rock, and they were opposing the KXL pipeline, a proposed transport of tar sands oil from Canada to Gulf of Mexico ports.  Besides running across sacred Native lands and encroaching upon farming and ranching lands, using eminent domain, this pipeline would have run under the Missouri River, a major source of water for not only those on the reservation, but also a multitude of people downriver from the crossing.   A major focus of those participating in the Standing Rock resistance was the protection of the water.  Pipelines tend to leak, and pollution with tar sands oil would be disastrous.

Although this is history, the movement to protect the water continues, as do the efforts by the various companies connected with the KXL pipeline construction.   The overt protests at Standing Rock came to an end, but the construction of the pipeline was halted at that time, although attempts to get approval for construction still continue.   The movement to protect the water has become more diffuse, but it, too, continues.   It is not only the inheritors of Standing Rock who are engaged in protecting our water.  Non-profit activist groups large and small advocate for, clean, and defend our rivers, lakes, oceans and aquifers.  They, too, understand that water is life.  More water than visible land comprises the Earth.  Our bodies and those of our fellow denizens of our earthly home are composed of more water than solid mass.  A cycle of water acts as a living stream of nurture for the planet.  We are blessed that these water protectors are there.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the water cycle with one of my older students.  His assignment included more than just the simple “water evaporates, clouds form, rain or snow falls, rivers carry it back to lakes or the sea.”   We also looked at the effects of drought and flood and touched on the influence of climate change on the water aspects of the weather.  More significantly, we examined the effects of not only the water cycle, but also of human activity, on the aquifers.  Aquifers store underground water which can be used in times of drought or less rain.  Plants access the water through longer root systems; nature taps the aquifers with natural springs; people drill wells to provide themselves with water closer to their dwellings than the nearest creek or river.   Some of the water in larger aquifers can be eons old.   Worldwide, the levels of water in these underground water storage systems is lowering; the aquifers are drying out.  Why?

We examined particularly the Ogallala Aquifer in the central United States, in the area we call the Great Plains or High Plains.   Before the advent of advanced technology, this aquifer was able to sustain the non-rain water needs of the region it underlies, and to recharge itself through groundwater seepage during times of rain or snow melt.  Then came the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, caused by farmers plowing much of the grass cover of the plains lands to grow crops such as wheat and corn and other grains.  Plowing up the grass exposed the topsoil, which blew away with the winds on the plains during that time.  When the farmers finally returned, they brought with them more technology with which to access the underground water for irrigation.    A traditional windmill can withdraw only so much water at a time; high-tech drilling and pumps are another story.  Agriculture became a major consumer of aquifer water.  (Other consumers are cities, with their large numbers of people who want constant easy water access, suburbs with their manicured lawns, desert cities sporting swimming pools, and the like.)

Currently, water is being taken from the Ogallala Aquifer (and other aquifers) faster than it can be replenished.  A slow, soaking rain is the most optimal means of refill.  Aquifers are renewed by groundwater and slow rain runoff soaking through the soil to the aquifer.  Floods and major storms are less effective.  However, human-influenced climate change is increasing the incidence of floods and major storms and leaving other areas rainless for long periods of time.  Rain runs more quickly off our farmed lands, often polluting the rivers into which it runs.  Runoff which reaches the river has less chance of soaking to an aquifer.   We are building more cities.  Why should that matter, except for increased numbers of people depending on the aquifers?  Consider.  How does rain reach an aquifer?  By soaking into the ground before it becomes runoff into a river or sewage system.  Compare the amount of bare ground in the country to the bare ground in the city.   In the city, we have mostly pavement; the ground is paved over, and the rain has no chance to sink in.  Instead, it goes as runoff into a sewage system or perhaps a nearby river.

We humans, ostensibly the smartest beings on the planet, have developed a sophisticated system of water consumption without considering the need for renewal, the impact of our civilization on the sources of our water, or the balance of nature which was designed to sustain us and other beings.   We have looked at a multifaceted issue from one angle only.  Are we smart enough to develop ways to replenish what we have taken and ensure future replacement of what we use?   I am sure we have the capability.  Are we humble enough to admit that we are not smarter than nature, not able to sustain a one-way flow of consumption?   I hope for our survival that we are.

To those who are in or are entering or who are aiming to enter scientific fields, I ask for the sake of our survival as humans to wield this powerful tool with a goal and attitude of understanding the Earth and the natural aspects of our environment and habitats so as to cooperate with this primal system and support its continued existence.  We are smart, but using our intelligence to conquer nature instead of cooperating and to create what we consider to be a better system will ultimately backfire; we will then either perish or exist in a post–natural world of which we now have only inklings.   Let us all, together, develop the humility to realize that we are part of a greater whole, not separate beings outside of that whole, and permitted to destroy it with our consumption and at our convenience.

Peace, Diane