Climate A New Story by Charles Eisenstein
Step outside of the campaigns that seek to change the course of the climate crisis and try to listen with a dispassionate ear. You will hear a lot of numbers being called out in a game of eschatological bingo.
“Only TEN years to save the Earth”
“SIX feet of sea-level rise by 2100”
“76 MILLION climate refugees by 2050”
This begs the question: are people influenced by numbers? Scientists and economists certainly are as they understand the context in which the numbers are presented. Politicians who listen to advice from scientists and economists are influenced because they trust their advisors. But does the man in the street know what these numbers mean? Ten years might seem a truly luxurious timespan to someone who was brought up in the Cold War and was always only ten minutes away from being incinerated by incoming atomic bombs.
Numbers might be accurate, but in themselves tell us nothing. They need context and narrative in order to find a place in our understanding. That context and narrative is better known as a story, the way that human beings have always conveyed their knowledge of the world.
The idea of stories is critical to Eisenstein. He suggests that the contemporary world exists in a Story of Separation. This is a world ruled by numbers: how much money I earn, what is my house worth, how far did I run when I went jogging, how much milk should I buy. None of these numbers describes what it is to be human, what vexes us, what makes us happy. Quite the contrary, they enable us to describe the differences between us: how much more money I have than A, how much profit I made on the deal, how many customers I need to find next month to meet my targets. This world of numbers, lists, targets and times is not us, claims Eisenstein. This is not our real nature. We are separated from our true selves, from fellow humans and from the world by our bogus culture. We are living the Story of Separation.
It’s quite clear that huge rifts of separation exist amongst people: left versus right, Hindu versus Muslim, the fear of immigrants. People are also separated from the planet they live on. Land is seen as a development opportunity, the sea as a cheap way of disposing of waste, the Earth itself as a source of oil, iron and gold. Our world view of resources, development and profit separates us from the world as a living thing of infinite complexity. We either stand by passively as it is plundered or actively swing the wrecking ball. So attempting to challenge this story by using the terminology of separation, the language of numbers separated from context, makes no sense. It is not the revolution we need.
Separation is a state brought about by our culture or mindset. It is not to do with physical proximity. If we are separate from other people or nature, we can harm them without the action affecting us. If our culture is built upon exploitation, gaining an advantage as a result of someone else’s loss, our separation normalises that behaviour and it continues. So how do we escape?
“Love is the expansion of the self to include another. In love, your well-being is inseparable from my own. Your pain grieves me and your happiness gives me joy”.
In the sentence above Eisenstein completely reframes how we might address the climate crisis.
Firstly, stop thinking about excess carbon dioxide = rising sea levels. The crisis is global and intense. Seas full of plastic waste, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, vanishing glaciers, desertification, lack of access to clean water, child poverty, racism, democratic deficit. They are all the same crisis created by the same cause; a ruthless, loveless, violent belief that human beings can do what they like to each other and to the world without repercussions. It is true that these individual crises have been around a long time. But now there are so many human beings on this path that the impact is huge. A bar fight has escalated into a war.
By recognising that what we do to each other and what we do to the world is what we do to ourselves, we restore connection. We do this by loving ourselves, our fellow humans and the world we live in.
This is the argument with which Eisenstein opens the book. He then goes on to preempt his critics by being quite clear that a “vague promise of love” is not enough to save the world and uses the rest of the book to set out how a story of love, interconnectedness and in his terms, Interbeing, can turn the crisis around.
Eisenstein points out that most wars since World War II have failed in their objectives. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have all failed to achieve what they set out to do. As have the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Should not a mentality that fails so often be abandoned in favour of a radical alternative? The alternative to war is clearly the pursuit of peace, an approach born out of love and respect for those we disagree with.
Likewise, we will not win a War on Emissions against the oil companies. But a campaign of love for the Earth has every chance of leaving the oil companies behind, their products an irrelevance. Eisenstein walks us through topics like nuclear power, war, hunger, biodiversity and money to examine how this loving, connected approach might save us.
For me, this book was a revelation. I knew there were multiple crises but this was the book that brought them together. The book is incredibly broad in its scope, bringing together so many of the things we worry about, then providing an elegant answer to how we address them. I say address, not solve. Eisenstein is clear, we can’t chant our way to salvation. But if we seek to love, heal and connect we have a change of bringing the real change that would make a difference.
