A PERSONAL CRISIS AND COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

An Excerpt from my book:  Nature & Culture

A PERSONAL CRISIS AND COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

I find it impossible to reconcile the objective facts of the energy and minerals that I have consumed as a modern American with the objective facts of the immense alterations of the natural ecosystems that have resulted from that consumption. I have enjoyed the fossil fuel slaves who have afforded me health, education, food from all over the world, and ease of movement in my daily life as well as with nine trips to three continents as well as many more in North America. Certainly my travels mean that I have given far more than my share of CO2 to the atmosphere and to climate change. I have supported through my taxes (and military service) the non-productive costs in energy and matter of the Korean War, the Viet-Nam War, the Afghanistan War, two wars in Iraq, as well as participation in other military actions.

I have tried to balance my direct and indirect attacks on the Earth’s natural ecosystems, not by radically changing my participation as a fossil-fuel slave-holder, but as a teacher. Throughout my career, I taught geography that emphasized the ways natural and cultural systems mutually interacted, often emphasizing the ways individuals were active agents. Many of my courses required field observation of local landscapes in the hope that at this scale my students could begin to understand directly their relationship to the material world. In the 1960s when ‘environmental’ concerns became part of the thinking of many Americans, I shifted my academic emphases to both the “good” and the “bad” ways humans made their landscapes and impacted the natural world. I also began research and taught classes on the history and contemporary views of environment and ecology. However, I now think that I completely missed the underlying inevitability of humans’ inherent organic nature to find and exploit energy gradients in their environment.

Even as I have been aware and concerned with human alteration of the natural world, I have also been a faithful member of the exploitative culture of my 80 plus years on Earth. My efforts at changing the negative impacts on local ecosystems have been intense at times, but with little positive effect.

I have felt very frustrated by the overwhelming resistance to channeling the politics of growth away from short term concerns of a money economy to long term concerns about maintaining or creating sustainable natural systems in my neighborhood, city, and state. I have found that in almost all contested political issue involving land use, short-term economic concerns for the possibility of growth outweigh those about natural ecosystems. If these attitudes are so strongly embedded at the local level, I find it difficult to see them change regionally and nationally. And when millions of people on Earth simply search for enough food to eat and places to shelter, it is understandable that they are little concerned with preserving natural ecosystems.

I am part of modern, American ways of consuming. But I also see nature in terms of ecosystems that interconnect throughout land, sea, air, biota, and with human cultures. I deeply feel that my consumptive behavior contrasts greatly with my ideas about the ecosystems in which I am embedded. Thus I find myself in a classic double-bind in which most of my behaviors directly contradict the beliefs I have about how humans must live to sustain life on the planet. All of us continue in our modern lives even if we are aware of the great environmental disruptions we cause. We cannot escape from the society and culture in which we are embedded. We have lived ‘high on the hog’ even as we are aware that such ways of living increasingly and inevitably exploit the natural world.

In 1971 Gregory Bateson wrote (still with the thought of the possibility of change) that

” If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.”

I wonder if Bateson were alive today, he would think the world could endure. Most modern humans, even most “environmentalists,” continue to think in terms of ‘man versus environment.’ As an example, climate change is largely framed in terms of what we humans can do to ameliorate its negative effects, i.e. human technology is all that is needed to reverse climate change. By contrast, when we think of culture, technology, economy, politics, etc. as an integral part of the Earth’s ecology and natural evolution, we can get insights into what is happening as to pollution, extinctions, and entropy. We can see that we are precipitously accelerating flows of energy towards the Earth’s heat sinks. In the long run, we humans are but a blip in the run of the universe. (And the long run for the human species may be very short if we continue to focus almost exclusively on our individual and collective selves.)

The Short Run

Following Howard Odum’s “policies” that we discussed in my last talk may create disturbing cognitive dissonance because they demand new ways of thinking that contrast our cultural heritage–our thoughts about society, politics, economics–with natural ecology and organic evolution. Because at the same time, we want to both enjoy good and sane lives as we recognize that climate change, habitat destruction and pollution have deep human roots.. I recognize dissonance in myself because I am conflicted in comparing the life I live with the way I think about the destruction of the Earth’s natural ecological systems and the redirection of the natural course of organic evolution.

I am a fulltime participant in a society that

These questions keep plaguing me.

If you answer yes to any of these question, you sound to me like a crack addict who is willing to sell his/her home, restrict his/her kids’ futures and even diminish her/his own health to get that fix that allows them to repress the physical and mental anguish that lies so near the surface of their existence. But unlike the crack addict, whose addiction is condemned by society and is seen as needing correction, our addictive consumption is encouraged by a society that is based upon competitive, capitalistic growth. Lewis Mumford characterized this society in his book, The Pentagon of Power, as the five P’s of power, production, property, profit, and publicity. This is a view of the world in which the mind is separated from (and usually considered superior to) the body, the individual is exalted over the community, and humankind is placed in opposition to nature.

As a geographer, who has followed a career of environmental awareness that was awakened nearly seventy-five years ago by the symposium and book–Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, but who is also the product of the American way of progress and growth, I am caught within an untenable epistemology or way of knowing and thinking about the world. Like the alcoholic, who wavers between drunkenness and an unbearable sobriety, I continue my consumptive behavior—to buy that new tablet, that cell phone, that airplane ticket to Oaxaca, that wild salmon steak, that hamburger, exotic fruit or plastic wrapped meat while being unable to control society’s lure. Everywhere I look, I see my fellow humans doing the same. Just look at the aisles in Market of Choice, Valley River Mall, or Petsmart.

Indeed, I consume air cooled in summer and warmed in winter by fossil fuel energy. And I can easily ignore the environmental exploitation, pollution, and destruction that all of this consumption entails because it is overshadowed, here and now, by the personal pleasures of living grandly in the style of the early 21st Century with other people who are as pleasantly cosseted as I.

Environmentalists Anonymous

Like the drug addict, must we “hit bottom” before we seek relief? I believe that for our society to hit bottom an environmental disaster of an unimaginable magnitude will have to occur. But individually, I believe, we may hit bottom when we are each convinced intellectually, emotionally, and especially in our personal bodily condition that the way we know and think about the world has failed to prevent the excesses of our addiction to exploit our natural environment. How can I help resolve this cognitive dissonance?

Alcoholics Anonymous with its Twelve Steps and Traditions has led the way for many to overcome their addictions. It may offer those of us addicted to environmental exploitation a possible model of a way to a saner, healthier life. I am attracted to the way of AA because I have seen its positive effects on close friends and family members. I am especially attracted to the epistemology of the Twelve Step Method because of its effective approach to addiction. Forty-eight years ago Gregory Bateson recognized the epistemology of AA as a successful approach to overcoming addictive behavior.

The premise of AA is that once one has “hit bottom,” he or she can only admit that he/she is an addict and that his /her life is out of control. In other words, our actions cannot be made to correspond with our thoughts; in Bateson’s words, we realize that we are caught in the double bind of mind versus body; our mind and body are sending us conflicting messages that cannot be reconciled and which are depriving us of sanity and health. That admission of addiction is the essence of Step 1 of AA.

Applying the Ten Step approach, a member of Environmentalists Anonymous might read

Step1: We admitted we were powerless over our exploitation of the environment–that our lives had become unmanageable.

If we cannot control our addiction with our current ways of thinking of mind versus body we must come up with a new way of thinking—a new epistemology. Step 2 does exactly that through the recognition that we are part, but only part, of a Power greater than ourselves, a Power that is sane and healthy, a system in which mind and matter, humans and environment, are not opposed. As Gregory Bateson wrote:

“The self is but a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, deciding.”

The realization that we are merely part of a naturally evolving and ecological world is truly a humbling experience for those of us raised in the traditions of The Enlightenment and Modern beliefs which stress the power, rationality, and individuality of humans and humanity.

Step 2 might read: We came to believe that we are but a small part of evolutionary and ecological systems within which we may be restored to sanity.

The next step toward sanity may be as difficult as the acknowledgement that may come only after “hitting bottom.” To surrender to this new way of thinking is for most modern Americans, seen as a great threat to our current ways of life. But viewed in the context in which every technological triumph disrupts some ecological or evolutionary relationship– often in startling and precipitous ways–one catches glimpses of disasters far more threatening than the alterations of our current life-styles. Continued human survival in ecologic and evolutionary terms surely rests outside our own control; our technological addictions only precipitate the disturbance of the many interrelated natural systems of which we are but a small part. Steps 2 and 3 of AA underlie the new epistemology with the conviction that we are merely “part of” something much greater than ourselves. As a prospective Environmentalists Anonymous member, I like to call the ‘Power greater than myself,’ Gaia–the earth that resulted from the conquest of the atmosphere with oxygen.

Step 3. might read: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to becoming part of these systems.

If we accept this new fundamental perspective, we can actively and honestly become part of it by physically acknowledging, and wherever possible rectifying, the wrongs we have done in the past. This is the essence of the next seven steps of EA. :

Step 4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5 We admitted to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6. We were entirely ready to remove all these defects of character.

Step 7. We were humbled by our shortcomings.

Step 8. We made a list of the environmental and ecological systems we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9. We made direct amends to such systems wherever possible, except when to do so would further injure them or innocent persons.

Step 10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

Step 11 is a call to prayer and meditation that reaffirms our humility as part of an unimaginably larger system

Step 11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the natural ecological world, praying only for knowledge of its power and how we can better be part of it.

Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others addicted to exploiting the environment, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

The Twelfth Step urges us to carry the new way of thinking to other addicts who want to overcome their addiction. Maybe that is what I am doing: proposing that we apply the ways of thinking of AA to our relationship within our environment. I believe that we need to acknowledge that our behavior is addictive and destructive and cannot be overcome by continuing to view the world as we now do. We need to accept that humans are merely part of a larger system—a slowly evolving ecosystem within which lies our continued health and sanity. We then need to inventory the world and what we have done within it in the light of that new perspective, humbly and honestly seeking help and trying to make amends for what we have done wrong. And we need to commune with that Force or Power or God or Gaia of which we are but a small part through prayer or meditation.

Let me repeat Gregory Bateson’s concluding paragraph of forty years ago:

“It is […] asserted that the nonalcoholic world has many lessons which it might learn from the epistemology of systems theory and from the ways of AA. If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.”

As with the AA tradition, we addicts might remain anonymous—not to protect us from the displeasures and antagonisms of society, but to remind us to place principle before continuing to live as we do today.

“Hello. My name is Al. I’m addicted to exploiting the environment.