Imagination and Climate

I think when I write I have this fantastic feeling that someone could be reading it. Like a sharing of minds for a brief moment of time. It’s so beautiful. We have this tremendous energy that is our life. Transformative energy, really. Not really ours, something that passes through us. We quite literally consume elements of our environment. In doing so, we are transformed by the things we consume, as we transform them into carbon dioxide and water. We transform kale into kisses for our loved ones, reading a book, hearing the sound of a cricket, and mowing the lawn. It’s remarkable, really. And as much as this transformational process is reciprocated in our material consumption, it is also true in our spiritual consumption. Here, we consume archetypes and stories we absorb from our environment. Metabolized by our experience, they are transformed into (and by the) puppy kisses, lawn mowing and book reading.

I think a lot about the climate crisis, which is commonly framed as a defect in human consumption. The narrative suggests that the current patterns of human consumption of material items (food, electricity, infrastructure, and goods) have consequences for our environment that will dramatically alter life on Earth. It will reduce human survival as well as the survival of countless other species. It’s worth noting that people argue endlessly about whether the data “really” says this or not. We should understand that science can never really “prove” anything. It can only provide us with a specific lens through which we can choose to view a problem. Science has models and tools that it uses to make predictions. If we have a model of climate change that we have reasonable confidence in, and we have rigorously linked the behavior of that model to environmental stewardship, then that is the lens. Whether we choose to look through the lens depends on what we are trying to accomplish. And I feel like this is an important point. Science cannot make decisions. Humans make decisions through the process of discernment. Science is only a means of providing information to aid decision-making. It cannot tell us what to do. So beware of the idea of “following the science”. There is no entity of “science” to follow. It’s just a tool, like a hammer. No one “follows the hammer”. Instead, we follow the process of discernment, which is messier, requires us to explicitly identify what we value and at what cost, and invariably involves an uncomfortable confrontation with one’s own bias.

For me, facing the climate crisis often feels like a losing battle. It’s difficult to become aware of my own habits and how out-of-alignment they are with my understanding of environmental impact. For example, driving my car to work each day consumes an extraordinary amount of energy. Or buying dog food - produces quite a bit of plastic waste, the carbon footprint of meat production, and package delivery. Everything that I do has consequences that I can’t understand the magnitude of. I hope that in the process of discernment in the climate crisis era, we collectively decide that we value the responsible stewardship of Earth’s resources at the cost of some of our old stories about what our day-to-day lives should look like. In that case, we will need lots of new stories to metabolize, new options we can use to face the fires of discernment together. In essence, I think it’s valuable to consider the possibility that consumption not the primary failure in the climate crisis but rather, that the primary failure may be one of personal and collective imagination. In particular, I feel that the climate crisis may be a failure of available stories and archetypes about what our lives may look like together. I think this imagination and availability of stories and archetypes for psychic consumption is what ultimately drives diversity - the fundamental prerequisite for evolution.