Go to start of "Don't Just Do Something; Sit There"
5. Inconclusion
5.1 Personal Reflections
I have worked at the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) for the past several years. Much of my time has been spent editing the RIC's quarterly magazine, World Rainforest Report. My work has been an expression of my concern for the Earth, but only rarely has it been an expression of my inner processes. In general it has seemed that there has been little opportunity for my personal expl6ration to find expression in my work, and this lack of integration has been a source of some disappointment.
Writing this paper has to some extent connected these two areas of my life, and may provide me with a way of integrating them more fully in the future.
The key is that in this project I have been looking at experience rather than just behaviour. It is the quality of my own and others' experience that brings things to life for me. And it is only through looking at human experience, and what shapes it, that we can truly come to grips with the global ecological crisis, For lasting change to occur in the world, there ultimately have to be basic changes in the ways that human beings experience the world.
How we perceive the passage of time is crucial to how we experience the world, and I hope I have shown that it also plays a crucial role in determining how we treat the world. A greater understanding of this relationship between our experience of time and how we treat the Earth can help free us from patterns of behaviour which degrade the Earth and diminish the quality of our experience.
I invited friends to read and comment on drafts of sections of this paper. I also discussed the issues involved with people that I know. I received some criticism of my suggestion that busyness was compulsive in our society. It was pointed out to me that for many people, this is simply untrue. Its easy for someone in my position to make such judgements, but many people have little choice about how busy they are. I live on a community where collective ownership of land and infrastructure reduces costs significantly, and where the consumerist values of the dominant culture have to some extent been rejected. Many people, due to circumstances they have little control over, do not have such freedom and I came to realise that I had not been taking enough account of this. It was a reminder of how easy it is to make questionable generalisations based on one's own experience.
I enjoyed doing the cartoons. Our relationship with time is a fertile ground for humour, because it has paradoxical and ridiculous aspects to it. The cartoons highlight some aspects of the issue, but not all the things I consider significant. This is simply because I had ideas for cartoons about some things but not about others.
Most of what I have said in this paper has been negative in the sense that it is an attempt at analysing what could be described as destructive behaviour, driven by motivations of which we are insufficiently aware. Yet in another sense, it is positive, since its aim is to increase my awareness, and possibly the awareness of others. Through greater awareness of what motivates our actions, we achieve greater freedom.
It may also seem from reading this paper that I see little of value in modern industrial society. Such an impression would not be entirely inaccurate. While some of our culture's scientific and technological
achievements are impressive, I find it hard to be kindly disposed towards a way of life which threatens the survival of every species on Earth, and inflicts great deprivation on its own species.
However, I see my feelings on this as being largely beside the point, since the continued existence of industrial civilisation is not dependent on whether or not I approve of it. My intention here is not to convince anyone of the evils of our way of life. Rather, my aim has been to identify one aspect of our culture -- our valuation of time -- that could be changed to the great benefit of the Earth and of human beings.
The call for a slower pace of life is implicit in what I have to say. This can occur, both on an individual and a collective level, without a blanket rejection of our civilisation as a whole.
There were many other aspects of my topic which I would have liked to explore if I had had enough time. Here are some of them:
* The connections between television, how we see time and how we treat the environment is one such issue. David Suzuki in his book Time to Change writes about the environmental implications of television's effect on our perceptions (Suzuki 1993).
* How gender affects time valuation.
* What is time? I have not looked at what physicists and spiritual teachers have to say about this question. Rather than look at what time actually is, or whether there even is such a thing, I have concentrated on how people experience it. A deeper investigation of time would have been productive but more time consuming -- assuming time is a thing which can be consumed -- which I could only have established after a lengthy investigation.
* An investigation of the relationship between Right Brain/Left Brain theories and our perception of time. Our culture tends to emphasise left-brain activities, which deal in symbols and logic. The right side of the brain, which deals with motor skills, creative thinking and intuition, is not as highly valued. I suspect that one's perception of time differs depending on which hemisphere one is operating in, and that our preoccupation with line& time is linked to our tendency to gravitate towards the left side of the brain. In my work as a calligraphy teacher, I have often heard, at the end of a two-hour class, remarks like "Wow ! Time's up already!" or "Where did the time go?". Calligraphy is a predominantly right-brain activity, and it appears that while practicing calligraphy, time perception is altered.
* I have looked very briefly at some indigenous cultures and how they experience time. Opposed to this I have talked about "our culture" and "the dominant ideology" without explaining myself I have been referring to western values found in Europe, North America, Australia and other former European colonies. More recently, Japan and other Asian countries have adopted similar attitudes in their efforts to emulate the west. I have not examined Asian attitudes towards time, and this would have been another rewarding area of study.
* I would have liked to conduct more interviews. Initially I was reluctant to do first-hand research because I found the process of reading and thinking about the issue so absorbing that I didn't want to do anything else. I also thought that conducting research would restrict the range of my inquiry. I avoided this simply by researching only one aspect of the things I wrote about. Further research could have explored the relationships people have with the future.
* Most importantly, what do we do about the issue? I deal with some possibilities below. but this could be an area for much more in-depth study.
Looking for solutions raises the question: If positive change is to occur, will it come about as a result of structural changes in society as a whole, or as a result of changes in the values of its citizens? If, as appears likely, both types of change are called for, which is more important, and how are they related? Attempting to answer these questions raises another one that I am often confronted with in various forms:
Who is responsible for the way things are -- individuals or society? Are people helpless victims of the social forces which shape their circumstances and values, or are individuals responsible for the state of society as a whole, since it is the sum total of individual choices which determines the nature of a society? I don't know of any simple answer to this question.
If one considers the behaviour of an individual, her choices may be perfectly rational, given the circumstances in which they are made. If however, one steps back and observes the end result of numerous such choices by all the members of a society, one is likely to find that the collective impact is far from rational. Structural changes are therefore needed, because they affect the conditions under which individual choices are made. Currently, people often find themselves in situations where the only way for them to act with environmental sensitivity is to disregard their own self-interest. A sustainable society will remain a dream if its creation is dependent on such self-sacrifice.
Individual choices, on the other hand, will in part determine the kinds of structures adopted by a society. Ecologically sustainable structures will not survive unless they are socially sustainable as well, and they will not be socially sustainable unless they have solid support from most individuals in society.
While writing this paper, I listened to a radio interview of the American author of The Soul of Politics (unfortunately I did not record his name or any other details of the interview). He talked about the need for societal change, and the level of discontent that many people had with their lives. The interview was followed by a talk-back session and one listener phoned in with a challenging question: Yes, she said, many people on the fringes of society were dissatisfied with their lives, but what about people with secure incomes? How does one convince the people who are "just cruising" that social change is necessary? The author's response: they ain't just cruising. They may give that impression. They may have plenty of possessions, but they are short one essential thing. And the lack of it makes them as desperate as everyone else. They are short of time.
A shortage of time doesn't just cause global impoverishment. It causes personal impoverishment as well. In choosing to be less busy, people will not only be helping the Earth. They will be helping themselves and each other.
5.2 Towards Solutions
It has been claimed that one should not point out problems unless at the same time one points towards solutions to those problems. I don't accept this view, since I think that achieving true understanding of a problem is a necessary first step to solving it. Simply exploring the issue, therefore, is a positive step.
However, I would like to explore briefly some steps that may help change both our experience of time and our relationship with the Earth. I consider two types of change: personal change and structural change. As I have attempted to show above, the relationship between these two types of change remains unclear to me.
Structural Change
"Our resource decisions should be based on a time span that Suits ecological processes ", writes Joe Friend (1995 p.1).. "Instead we are basing them on political terms of3 -4 years". To address this problem, Friend calls for the adoption of the principle of Intergenerational Equity - the principle that "our present generation should maintain the health, diversity and productivity of the environment or enhance it for the benefit of future generations' '(ibid p.2).
Friend believes that in Australia, this principle should be enshrined in legislation on a state and federal level. This has already been done elsewhere:
In 1994 the Republic of Namibia drafted its Constitution with the guiding principles of ecosystems maintenance, ecological sustainability and Intergenerational equity. The Philippines Supreme Court also accepted Intergenerational Equity in a ruling to stop all unsustainable logging in 1992 [Friend 1995 p.2].
The next election, rather than the next generation, is foremost in the minds of the politicians who make decisions affecting such non-renewable resources as soils, old growth forests, oil and other minerals. This means that we respond to short-term crises rather than consider the long-term impact of our actions. One possible antidote is to lengthen the term of office of governments, so that they do not continually have the prospect of an election looming over their heads. Such a change could have its down side, however. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in office for quite long enough.
Another suggestion for structural change comes from Joanna Macy. She calls for the establishment of a "House of Spokespersons for the Future" in the United States:
Though without the power to pass laws, it would speak for the rights of coming generations. Its members, or "Spokes", would be high-school seniors.. The House of Spokes would convene for a week three times a year, say in early January, spring and summer, evaluate Bills before Congress and suggest new legislation (Macy 1991 p.224).
But legislation will not by itself be enough to change our relationship with time. Politicians are capable of making short-term decisions and justifying them on the basis of lofty principles. Public awareness of the issues is essential if this is not to happen. For this reason, personal change is also essential.
Decentralisation also seems to me to be important. While thinking about this I imagined a community to be like a revolving wheel. The bigger the wheel, the faster it moves, and the more an object on the circumference is likely to fly off. The bigger a community, the faster it moves, and the more its members fly off in different directions. By living in smaller communities, the bonds which busyness tends to weaken will be made stronger, and the costs involved in busyness will be more apparent.
Personal Change
By this I mean change in the values, attitudes and perceptions of individuals. It can be achieved largely through a questioning of the forces which shape our decisions and attitudes, and through experiencing time in new ways.
There appears to be an unseen bias in the ways we make decisions about how to spend our time. We do so in ways which do not take enough account of what we lose. Any course of action involves a loss, because so long as we are engaged in that action, we are unable to engage in any of the other activities we could have chosen. By choosing to operate at a rapid pace, we are choosing not to nurture relationships. We are choosing not to operate at a speed which is in tune with the cycles of nature. We render ourselves unable to respond spontaneously to whatever comes up. By moving too quickly, we choose not to relax, or look within, or be in tune with our emotions. Yet, we are unaware that by choosing to be busy, we are choosing to renounce these things.
The loss of wilderness does not enter into the cost-benefit analyses that economists use to decide whether a proposed development is worthwhile because wilderness does not have an economic value. Similarly, when we make decisions that increase our level of busyness, we generally do not take enough account of the things we will lose. This is because we are thinking in ways which make no allowance for the things we are likely to forego. The money and other benefits gained through busyness are somehow of a different order to the things we lose through busyness, and so it does not occur to us to balance them against each other.
Economists have tried to attach monetary value to such things as clean air and wilderness, so that they can be compared with things such as cars, televisions and clothes. Their attempts have been unconvincing, because some things don't lend themselves to being valued in this way. The situation with respect to decisions about our use of time is similar. I am sceptical about whether assigning monetary values to these things would be of any use. Other ways of making these decisions need to be used, and they need to make the non-monetary costs more obvious. I don't know how this can be achieved; I do know that we need to take more account of the things we lose through busyness.
Next year, if there is sufficient interest in the idea, I plan to launch an International Day of inaction for the Earth. Briefly, it is based on the understanding that to stop the war now being waged against the Earth by the human race, fundamental changes are necessary in how we live. Doing things to "save the Earth" is not enough. We need to stop doing the things that are causing the problems in the first place (see Appendix).
The case against consumerism is made strongly in books such as Ted Trainer's AbandonAffluence (Trainer 1988). This case needs to be made as strongly and as often as possible. It would seem that anything that encourages people to question their own motives for choosing to spend long hours earning money is a good thing. However, Ivan Illich cautions against promoting anti-growth views in an inappropriate context:
A well organised elite, vocally promulgating an anti-growth orthodoxy.. would be highly undesirable. By pushing people to accept limits to industrial output without questioning the basic industrial structure of modem society, it would inevitably provide more power to the growth-optimising bureaucrats and become their pawn (Illich 1973 p.1221.
This is another example of the complex relationship between personal and structural change, since Illich's statement implies that some forms of opposition to the growth-fixation of our culture could actually strengthen industrialism.
Part of our problem appears to be that we become trapped into habitual ways of viewing things. We have become accustomed to thinking in extremely short periods of time. Joanna Macy, one of the few people to have stressed the connection between time perception and environmental issues, runs workshops on what she calls Deep Time. Participants imagine they are present at the Big Bang where it all began, and move through our evolution into human beings. One of her meditations in Deep Time concludes in this way:
You speak not only as yourself or for yourself. You were not born yesterday. You have been through many dyings and known in your heartbeat and bones the precarious, exquisite balance of life. Out of that knowledge you can speak and act. You will speak and act with the courage and endurance that has been yours through the long, beautiful aeons of your life story as Gaia (Macy 1991].
Anything which widens our outlook in this way is a valuable contribution to enriching our lives and making us more sensitive and compassionate, both with each other and with the Earth.
6. Appendix:
International Day of Inaction for the Earth
We are accustomed to react to problems by doing things to solve them. This can be used to avoid facing the fact that it was our actions that caused the problem to begin with.
In the conventional response to environmental problems, a preoccupation with taking action leads to the belief that in order to "save" forests or other threatened ecosystems, we need to initiate expensive, large-scale projects. This is a continuation of the kind of thinking that has caused the problems in the first place.
Consequently, I intend this project to have a practical outcome: to launch what will be called an "International Day of Inaction for the Earth". The underlying assumption will be that threatened ecosystems are quite capable of looking after themselves, and that it is our intervention that causes them to be threatened. Basically, what we need to do is leave them alone.
Often, people are urged by many organisations to do things or donate money in order to help stop environmental destruction. Instead, supporters of the International Day of inaction will be asked to do nothing, in recognition of the fact that it is our actions that are the problem. An underlying assumption is that there is a fundamental flaw in an approach which advocates action to "save" threatened ecosystems, but allows a continuation of the behaviour which is causing the problem.
My initial task will be to contact individuals and organisations in several countries and ask them if they like the basic idea and whether they will help promote it. This will require sending them draft promotional material for the Day of Inaction. The subsequent course will be determined by the' response to this initial contact.
A major attraction for people is that they will not be asked to do very much at all. Rather, they will be given a reason to feel good about doing nothing. Another advantage is that the Day of Inaction can be seen as an antidote to the seriousness of the public discussion of environmental issues.
Problems:
* This is not an excuse to sit back and watch the Earth being ravaged. Nor it is a criticism of the many people who are working so hard to counteract the destructive actions of others. Rather, it is an invitation to look at the underlying causes of destruction. This needs to be made clear in any promotional material.
* Millions of people may accept the invitation to be part of the Day, but how will I or anyone else know? It is not much use making a statement if nobody hears it. I need to come up with some easy, striking way in which people can register their support and involvement in the Day of Inaction. In the movie, Network, thousands of people regularly open their windows and yell at the top of their voices "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" That's not quite what is needed here, but maybe something like that....
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