immanence

I’ve been using the metaphor of the Sustainability Bottleneck in my teaching, but another one that is more immediately graspable is The Bubble.

Two things landed in my in-box this morning that testify to this (but that’s a pretty daily occurrence, e.g., see this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, all from the past week). One of these is a New York Times op-ed by a meteoreological business guy, called “A New Dark Age Looms.” The second is an interesting piece by Australian eco-anarchist farmer Glenn Albrecht called “Exiting the Anthropocene and Entering the Symbiocene” (which originally appeared on his blog in December).

Where they concur is that, as scientists have been increasingly predicting, we can expect a Coming Unraveling — an unraveling of the “established patterns and regularity of Holocene phenology” of the past 12,000 years, followed by a “new abnormal” in which

“life will be characterised by uncertainty, unpredictability, genuine chaos and relentless change. Earth distress, as manifest in global warming, changing climates, erratic weather, acidifying oceans, disease pandemics, species endangerment and extinction, bioaccumulation of toxins and the overwhelming physical impact of exponentially-expanding human development will have its correlates in human physical and mental distress.”

There are, in this sense, two bubbles: there is that 12,000 year Holocene Bubble that we all (humans and our companions) have benefited from; and there is the bubble of middle-class life that my students and I and others in developed countries benefit from today.

As every child knows, bubbles are wondrous and beautiful things, to be admired and cherished while they last. But then they burst.

I tell my students we should admire and enjoy our bubble while we can. And that we should make the most of it, to prepare for what follows.

What are the collective capacities we have, or will need to develop, for post-Bubble life? (Albrecht has the temerity to envision a positive version of post-Bubble life, which he calls the Symbiocene. We need positive visions, to be sure; I’m with him.) If we can figure that question out and play our part in the development of those capacities, then we’re doing okay.