Our Ecological Wellbeing Depends on More Than the Earth’s Climate

If you look up the term ‘climate change’ on Google Trends, you will note that since 2004, the term’s search frequency has increased, unsurprisingly. If, on the other hand, you search ‘environmental degradation’ or ‘environmental issues’, you will see that these terms have had a small but noticeable decrease in popularity on the search engine in the same time frame. While there are many factors that might play into this, it highlights something important - something I have sensed for some time - which is that we have collectively lost sight of the bigger picture.

The environmental movement (or climate movement more accurately) seems to have gained momentum. In 2019 we saw unprecedented numbers of concerned citizens take to the streets all over the world in the name of our Earth’s precious climate. The rise of Greta Thunberg likely helped to spark this, but in any case, it seems that many eyes were opened to the impact that human activity can have on our atmosphere.

This is wonderful, but I wonder if we are approaching this from the wrong end. Is climate change the cause of our concerns or is our warming climate a symptom of something else? In other words, what are the roots of the climate crisis we are facing? What would we find if we dug deeper?

It seems to me that the more pertinent issue facing humanity is our disconnection from and treatment of the Earth. While some might argue that protecting the climate would help to address mistreatment of the planet, it feels somehow backwards to me. And yet so it is with many of the issues we face: we take painkillers without asking why the pain is there, we take anti-depressants without asking why we’re depressed, we leave our partners before really asking, ‘What went wrong here?’

The climate crisis is a symptom of the way we treat the many precious resources of this planet. In order to restore ecological wellbeing in any meaningful way, we have to look for the root before or as we treat the symptom.

We have become so far removed from the impact of the lifestyles we lead that we are largely unaware of our everyday impact on the environment. The new couch we just purchased, the cheap hand soap we just picked up, the balloons for the birthday party. We consume these things without thinking much about what it took to make them and where they will go when we are done with them. It is much a matter of ‘out of sight our of mind’.

And yet none of this is to say that we should condemn ourselves for doing our best to live in the world we were delivered to; however, it does ask us to sit with the reality of our consumption habits and ask ourselves:

How have I become disconnected?

Is it possible for me to reconnect?

What would it look like to reconnect?

Our ecological wellbeing depends upon our waking up to the fact that we are not separate from the environment but an integral part of it. What happens over there sends out a ripple that impacts what’s going on over here. Reducing emissions will first of all be nearly impossible if we don’t tune into our own habits of consumption and our own yearnings for more. Secondly, what happens if we do manage to reduce emissions and yet the forests are still suffering? The oceans and lakes are still polluted? What then?

A model for understanding how our consciousness needs to shift is Bill Plotkin’s eight ecocentric stages of human development. In his work, he argues that in contemporary Western society we are only supported (“and poorly at that”) to get to the third stage, which is associated with early adolescence. We need to move beyond it in order to truly see ourselves as part of the whole and to start healing our world in an authentic way. In a talk given at Schumacher College, Plotkin notes:

“Our mainstream contemporary cultures fully support [being stalled at stage three], and you might even say have been very deliberately designed to keep people from growing past early adolescence because there’d be no one interested in a consumer society that is eating up the world if people matured beyond that.”

And so as integral beings of this earthly and universal community, we might ask ourselves if there is a deeper way of tuning into our environmental crisis. What are the bigger questions we can ask? How can we start to work at addressing the conditions that have set the stage for a planet that has been plundered? Undoubtedly there are many practical solutions we can start or continue to engage on small and large scales. Governing bodies and businesses have a role to play in this, too.

And yet, alongside these practical steps we might take, is there some part of us that is ready to look at what really happened here? To inquire about the role that the human psyche plays in creating the conditions of the world? Are we ready for a conscious evolution of that psyche - of soul and of spirit, too?

Our beloved Earth is depending on it.

Photo by Aviv Ben Or on Unsplash