What I would like you to do about the Ecological Emergency

For those of you who don't yet understand why I use this phrase, please read on

In the next piece I write for Substack, I want to veer off on a tangent and write about what I see as the main issues facing Ireland at the moment because that’s where I live. And also, because I’m from Scotland, the land of Trump’s mother and her people, I’d like to indulge in a little fantasy of what I’d say to him if I met him, on the subject of wind farms.

What would you say?

It’s easy to believe people know what you mean when you say things, and that your ideas are mainstream, and therefore uninteresting, or so bizarre as to merit no more than a cursory raised eyebrow from otherwise discerning others. But I’m deeply frustrated that in the search for ever more stimulation and distraction, the current populace fails to appreciate how life changing it would be to turn their attention to the ideas that I’ve attempted to outline in books and papers, and practice living on the thin liminality of awareness that opens the possibility of agency. You, too, can be free.

But the first problem is complexity. How to get across something so mind-bogglingly complex as free will that requires a total revolution in perspective, and that then asks for total dedication to practice? Because that’s what it takes, folks: practice. Not big steps, not a guru, not some ultimate arbiter of truth to guide you, but practice being aware of what is happening right now.

Perhaps you don’t need to understand the theory, or the detail. Perhaps it’s enough to say, do it right now! Pay attention to what’s going on around you and within you right now, from how you’re sitting, standing or walking, to how you're breathing, to what you’re thinking, to the light that’s coming in and from which direction, to everything else. That’s when it gets tricky: how can you pay attention to everything? The mind jumps from one object of attention to the next, or else becomes tired, and goes into a kind of shut down. It can be very uncomfortable to pay attention to thoughts, especially if they’re repetitive, as they often are, and run along the same tram tracks of suffering and pain that have all too regularly forced you to confront the mistakes you’ve made, or the traumas you’ve been through, and the habits you’ve developed that deepen the grooves of damage. Perhaps you’re inclined to do something else, something more useful than sitting still, and watching the waves of thought crash against the same obstacles to peace and freedom. All too easy to fall back into the trap, isn’t it?

My passion is attempting to understand and use compassion as a way to dissolve obstacles in the same way that water dissolves rock, knowing, of course, that this will take longer than I’ve got, that I’m doomed to failure. Even if I make a bit of progress, though, I’m more likely to find a way to live with what I’ve done, and who I’ve been, and it will be marginally easier, perhaps, to die without the agony of not wanting to let go. All that’s a bit theoretical from where I’m sitting now. One day, it will not be.

To get to the bottom of what ails me, I need to know what sort of creatures we are, what kind of options are actually open to us, and how we might shift the trajectory personally and globally of our disintegration and destructiveness as a species. Perhaps the first thing to realise is that we’re not that different from all the other species on this planet, we have the same drives, the same addiction to stimulation and desire. But we’re not the same as everything else, in the sense that the niche we’ve synthesised out of the elements that come from soil and oil, gas and air, fusion and fission, can’t easily return back to the cyclical patterns of creation and destruction from which they were formed. Instead, we’ve created a kind of gateway through which we stepped into artifice and this has led us to become isolated, and increasingly divorced, from place and time.

This is because the way we are, as humans, is ruled far more by our capacity for abstraction than it is by our capacity for speed, or stealth. Evolution took us along a path of opposable thumbs and brains and language as the expression of thoughts from those brains and because of this abstraction, the way we’ve interpreted ourselves and our place in the world has also been as an abstraction. Even the earliest human societies seem to have dreamt up gods to be reckoned with beyond the storms and surging seas. And then, of course, we managed to manipulate the flames, which led to all kinds of experiments in burning, from roast beef to human sacrifice to furnaces and steel to rocket fuel.

What if I said to you we can’t help any of this, and instead of the slow building of self contempt that can creep in when we realise all the damage we’ve done, we could simply see ourselves as waking up? Can you see that as the same process that I talked about above, the awareness of what is happening now, as a response to all that has happened, and I mean all that has happened, up to now?

If this seems ambitious, this putting ourselves in context by seeing ourselves at the tail end of a veritable tsunami of events over which we have never had any control, it’s also humbling to accept the miniscule difference this realisation makes to the current moment, the crest of the wave in which we live, which is now. But this makes all the difference. Because it’s only in those rare moments when we take enough time, usually alone or at least in silence to become aware of ourselves that we manage to slip a pause between synapses long enough for the possibility of alternatives to arise. And it’s here that our agency lies, our capacity not for choosing freely, but for having options other than all the deciding factors in our decisions which we refuse to reflect on that therefore remain mired in obscurity.

If this is the only option we have to shift the fortunes of humanity from hellbent on ruin to doggedly awake to the small possibilities for kindness, or cooperation, it’s urgent we all at least make the effort to do our bit. I’d better see if I can do mine. More anon. Thank you for reading, and thanks, too, for your travails.