The New Normal Problem

2/2/23 – The quest for stability in a destabilized world

my photo of Donovan Quintero’s “Diné Family on Horseback,” on exhibit at the Museum of Native American History in NYC / original photo © Navajo Times, 2020

Hello everyone:

One way to accelerate the European transition away from fossil fuels is to ensure Ukrainian victory over Russia’s invasion. For an explanation, see Timothy Snyder’s elegantly succinct Why the World Needs Ukrainian Victory.

As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

Here’s something I think we all agree on: Our relationship with time has changed. It began to change several generations ago as we clocked our days and sped across landscapes, and now it feels like there’s no interval long enough or place remote enough for that old slow world to exist. Even in the middle of Antarctica I could hear the clock tick and see the contrails that tied me to the warm world.

It’s been nearly a century since Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe, which in retrospect seems like just one more metaphor for our modern restlessness.

We all recognize this, to one degree or another, but who among us is constantly aware of it? More likely, I think, we sometimes wake briefly as if from a dream to remember at a cellular level the ancient pace of life that characterized 99% of human history. We pause in a moment of silence and calm, wonder if things really need to be this busy, then sink back into the hectic dream in which there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it.

Or think of it this way: As you watch a show about historical times – like the Outlander series Heather and I have been watching recently – notice how the director’s quick cuts from scene to scene collapse hours, days, or even years into seconds. That busy montage is fundamental to storytelling, I know, but it’s also an analogue for our new normal experience of time. We’re always on the move, compressing multiple storylines into one quick-cut sequence we call our working day. This bears little resemblance to the lived experience of the people of the pre-industrial past which, again, is nearly all of human history.

I’d like to go further and say that our relationship with change has changed. We’ve normalized a destabilizing pace of rapid transformation, as if life on an accelerating treadmill was the same as standing in a forest listening to the wind in the trees. You can find a library of books – from anthropology to self-help – addressing what this can mean in social and psychological terms. We suffer various anxieties and often find life’s joy and meaning replaced with to-do lists.

In response, we can join the Slow Food movement, read Russian novels rather than watch Netflix, unschedule our kids’ lives, limit our intake of online information, and even try to scale down our consumption and financial ambitions in order to get off the treadmill and enjoy a quiet life more fully. Despite what the world keeps telling us, we don’t have to live inside an app with videos and ads flashing in our face as we struggle to either focus or opt out.

Internet speed now exceeds the speed of thought, and thus often replaces it. We’re lost in various supermarkets, real and virtual, shopping for sustenance, entertainment, ideas, sex, love, and community. All empty moments can be filled. Scrolling has replaced observing, waiting, wandering, and other forms of once ordinary unscheduled existence. We inhale information and exhale commodified personal data.

For more than 200 years, since trains first left the station, the powers that be have been collapsing space and time into a structural convenience whose purpose is the scheduling and mapping of information and profit.

Do I sound old and grumpy yet? For someone else’s rant on the rate of change, here’s Indrajit Samarajiva in his blog, Indi.ca, in a post called “A Normal Person from 20 Years Ago Would Look Like a Monk Today”:

We keep piling on more and more information from every corner of the globe without ever looking at what’s in front of us. We stray further and further from the monastic to the spastic, thinking we’re getting more enlightened and we’re not. The phones light up, but the faces in front of them remain dim. Our city lights blot out the stars, 24/7 news blots out history, and buildings blot out nature. We live in a fallen age, thinking we’re rising. We used to be monks.

I’m not romanticizing the lived experience of the pre-industrial past. Then, as now, quality of life was often determined by forces and powers we cannot control, by often rare opportunities for abundance and good community, and by one’s health. Traditional societies had more leisure time and stronger social bonds, but today in much of the world human life is longer, better-fed, healthier, and more comfortable. Those benefits, though, have come at an extraordinarily high price, both externally with the disruption of planetary life and internally with our anxiety and ecological grief.

That price is so high that it can no longer be paid.

It’s important to remember that there’s no solid proof that it had to be this way, that a comfortable technological abundance for humans could only result from an ecological Faustian bargain. Though there are still quieter, healthier corners of the Anthropocene, where people live modest, fair, comfy lives amid biodiversity, those corners are shrinking. More importantly, that alternative has never been tested at the civilizational scale.

Now there’s no option but that alternative. The flood of new normals we swim in – from rivers of media, technology, and novelty-driven industry – must be redirected to reverse the harms of the Anthropocene.

the high cost of new normals

I could fill this entire essay with a partial list of the new normals that plague the new world we’ve built and are building – from climate to CRISPR to COVID and much, much more – but it’s easier to point out the only thing that hasn’t changed: human nature. If I was born into 18^th century Scotland, 12^th century India, or here on pre-contact Wabanaki land, my identity would have been formed by the people and culture around me. Born into a stable traditional culture I would have lived a traditional life.

Born into the Anthropocene as a middle-class American, I have lived at the leading edge of a destabilized and rapidly transforming world. An ever-changing and ever-growing suite of technologies structure my life rather than supplement it. We’ve unleashed millions of years of stored fossil fuels in decades. Several planetary boundaries have been violated. Conditions in the atmosphere and oceans no longer resemble anything our species has experienced. On land, massive loss of wetland, forest, and grassland ecosystems has accelerated. We eat four times as much meat as when I was born, a diet that is responsible for 60% of biodiversity loss. Wild mammals only make up 4% of total mammal biomass (the other 96% being us and our livestock). Agriculture has become a zero-sum operation, erasing habitat to feed humans. In response, human population has more than doubled in my lifetime, with 80 million additional souls (the population of Germany) still being added each year. Passing the 8 billion mark was a blip in the news.

Most of this has happened in the last hundred years.

And I, like you, have normalized it.

Which is not our fault, really. It is human nature, I think, to normalize any setting. We construct consciousness with narrative, and as a generalist species with an intensely social nature we find our stories in the conversations that surround us. Raise us in a prison or paradise, meth lab or metaverse, hospital bed or hiking shoes, and we’ll experience the world through those settings. We’re incredibly and depressingly adaptable.

Capitalism requires new normals. Success is generated by constant flux and growth. But this capitalist cascade of new normals is otherwise a sign of failure, with the evidence all around us. The large-scale and long-term stability necessary for sustaining abundant life has been eroded, in part because there are too many of us, and in part because we’ve allowed the normalized fables of “constant growth” and “the inexhaustible Earth” to radically disrupt the biology and geochemistry of the only planet that can nurture us.

Yet still too many of us are so focused on the new normals, good or bad, of our hectic daily lives that we scarcely notice the loss and damage in the natural world. We’re often distracted, sleep-deprived, and struggling to pay the bills. It’s no wonder we have short attention spans and ecological amnesia. Another day, another dollar.

One question I have is how many of us in the Anthropocene still know, culturally, how to live without intense and constant change. I’m not sure how many can even imagine it. One answer – the good news – is that if born into stability our descendants will normalize it. Another answer – the bad news – is that it will likely be several generations before we have even a chance to find out.

Because the irony of the new normal problem is that we desperately need a new normal. I’m tempted to say we need the old normal, but there’s no path back. We can only fight like hell to create a new and nontoxic stable abundance, fairly distributed across cultures, nations, ecosystems, and species, as we seek to find a new balance with a transformed Earth.

This is grief work, something we’re all familiar with. There’s no bringing the loved one back. There is only the necessary hard journey toward a new normal under new circumstances.

But take heart. There are so many good signs, so much good work being done, all around us. Every climate protest, rewilding project, conservation program, solar panel, and bike lane are steps toward a better new normal. All the relevant books, articles, scientific papers, newsletters, and pieces of legislation (like the Inflation Reduction Act) are pages written to change the civilizational story. Advances in agriculture should make it support life rather than abort it. Population growth is slowing. Our empathy for wildlife and ecosystems is growing.

the necessary future: the new making way for the old

We know what we need to know, scientifically and ethically, to make a better, more stable, and sustainable normal. Technologies must help reduce consumption rather than spur growth. Economies must become subsets of ecology. Our diet should fit the planet. We need to spend more time with moss and mollymawks than in the metaverse.

But part of the necessary new normal we need is a higher level of participation and activism. We need patience and determination in equal measure. The work ahead is complex and counterintuitive for a species that prefers to maintain the status quo. Much of what needs doing will be complicated by the unavoidable hard changes caused by a warming climate. We’re designing a new sustainable normal on the fly, facing all sorts of opposition along the way.

We’ve been so obsessed with new normals for too long to find an easy way out. We’re trapped in this quest for a better new normal for generations to come. The only rational way home is to consciously shape a new home with as many virtues of the past as we can manage. This is navigation through the landscape of grief and loss, and our children’s grandchildren will be in the thick of it. Our job is to make it a little easier for them.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

From Vox, a long thoughtful essay responding to philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book promoting her thinking on the question of our moral relationship with animals, and whether we should grant all species equal rights. Interestingly, her empathy is extraordinary but her reasoning seems to conflict with basic ecology.

From Undark, important research into the deaths of hundreds of thousands of birds and bats killed by renewable energy facilities.

From Population News, how the media insists that the news of China reaching peak population and beginning to decline is bad news, despite the obvious benefits.

From the Revelator: The Book of the Dead: The Species Declared Extinct in 2022.

From the University of Massachusetts’ Mass Woods, excellent information for New England landowners on how to increase your land’s old-growth characteristics. You can read a pdf or watch the video.

From NPR, the legacy of P-22, the Hollywood mountain lion that attracted so much attention to the needs of wildlife in frenetic Los Angeles. A massive wildlife crossing is under construction, thanks in part to P-22’s fame. For much more on wildlife crossings and the devastating impacts of our roads, read my three-part series which begins here.

From the Guardian, the rising numbers and likely costs of Antarctic tourism.

From Wired, a reality check on our global misuse of phosphorus, which like carbon is an essential geochemical whose slow Earth cycle we’ve upended. We’ve mined vast quantities to spread as fertilizer on crops, and much of what’s spread is lost and washed into stream and sea, causing algal blooms. We need an entirely different relationship with phosphorus, and the sooner the better.

From Mother Jones, we need to be thinking of EVs as battery banks to support the grid rather than simply as customers that siphon from it.