immanence

Some 2500 years ago, a man named Siddhartha Gotama articulated what have come to be known as the “4 Noble Truths”: the truth of dukkha, or fundamental suffering (that there is a basic unsatisfactoriness to life), the truth of its causes (that it arises from an ignorance and misperception of the nature of things, which are conditionally-arising-and-passing — process-relational, rather than stable and possessible), the truth of its cessation (that liberation from ignorance is possible), and the way of its cessation (the so-called Noble Eightfold Path).

In a similar spirit, I’m trying to capture my talk for this weekend’s iCreate Cape Breton workshop, in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in four pithy propositions. The talk is entitled “From Ecological Sacrifice Zones to a Global Movement of Movements,” and one of those sacrifice zones — the infamous Sydney Tar Ponds, now a public park called Open Hearth Park (see photo below and the Fifth Grade anticipatory vision for it, above) — is nearby.

Here are the 4 propositions.

1. The Existence of Socio-Ecological Suffering 

We all hunger, thirst, experience misfortune, get sick, witness others’ deaths, and die ourselves. But some get sick more often and experience more misfortune than others — for reasons that are not “natural,” but are political and economic in origin. This excess suffering constitutes a “turbulence” or an “unsatisfactoriness” within the fabric of socio-ecological relations on this planet.

2. The Cause of Socio-Ecological Suffering

This uneven distribution of environmental benefits and risks is produced by a system that works through capitalization, i.e., the rendering of more and more of the world into ownable resources, tradable commodities, exchangeable labor markets, and opportunities for economic profit.

By rendering buried and stored carbon deposits into industrial fuels, that system created Fossil Fuel Civilization, the most productive, and at the same time most destructive, civilization in human history. Carbon capitalism has created great abundance, but at a price. Its costs include high health risks, toxic by-products, large-scale disruption of ecosystems, and impending global climate change, with potentially suicidal intensification of risks to humans and nature.

These costs have usually been deflected outward, off-loaded, rather than being accounted for internally. Let’s call this a state of “dis-ease” — the system’s misrecognition of its own nature — and let’s name it “auto-immune climate-changing capitalism syndrome,” or “AICS” (rhymes with “aches”; hat tip to Nick Mirzoeff). This syndrome is capitalism’s capacity to protect itself while destroying the basis on which it thrives.

3. The Cessation of Socio-Ecological Suffering

It is possible to eliminate socio-ecological suffering:

(a) By internalizing the costs — the “bads” — so that they are factored into the production of the “goods.” (Let’s call this Industrial Ecology.) This requires the transformation of systems of production and consumption from open and debt-bearing ones into closed-loop, regenerative ones.

(b) By spreading the goods and bads much more justly and evenly, for instance, by democratizing decisions over what to produce and how to produce it. (Let’s call this Economic Democracy.)

4. The Noble Path of Liberation

At its most basic, the path forward requires

(1) Re-localization/re-indigenization/re-ecologization, or learning to live sustainably in place. This will need to be done technologically, through the development of non-polluting (non-cost and debt incurring) technologies; economically, through the development of sustainable local economies; socioculturally, through the development of locally suited and culturally sensible ways of “living well,” or buen vivir; and ethico-spiritually, through the development of Earth-honoring sentiments and practices.

(2) Democratization, or the granting of “say” to all parties irrespective of their political-economic positioning (wealth, power, privilege, representation). That this is not necessarily restricted to the human makes this task both tricky and endlessly challenging. But extending it to all humans is a non-negotiable requirement at this point in history.

(3) Appropriate globalization, or connecting with others to build a movement of movements — a global coalition between those with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and those whose short-term losses can be replaced by long-term gains.

The rest of my talk deals with movements in the arts that work on some dimension of this Noble Path Forward. These include artists and groups that expose the dynamics of carbon capitalism and its legacies of “slow violence” and toxic injustice; that envision and promote alternatives to it; and that build political and emotional alliances with others doing the same across the world.

Open Hearth Park’s success at its goals is debatable. It’s an enclosed and covered-up toxic waste dump turned into sports fields, walking trails, and a playground, with high uncertainty about the stability of its toxic legacy (of nearly a million tonnes of raw sewage, heavy metals, dioxins, PCBs, and other toxic sludge). That legacy is a small microcosm of the legacy of industrial civilization itself, which Earth will have to live with for long after that civilization is transformed, transfigured, or destroyed. The larger project of conversion is one we have to get much better at.

But I like the way the name easily slips into “open heart,” with its suggestion not only of being warm and welcoming, but of needing surgical precision at the extreme precipice between survival and death. What open heart(h) park will be on this planet five centuries from now?

On that note, Happy May Day and Beltane to those who celebrate one or the other.

Click here for full map (top) image.