The New Normal Problem

10/17/24 – The quest for stability in a destabilized world

a thoughtful merging of old and new normals / my photo of Donovan Quintero’s “Diné Family on Horseback” at the Museum of Native American History in NYC / original photo © Navajo Times, 2020

Hello everyone:

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 fractured our days into minutes and seconds while speeding across landscapes that once embraced us. Now there’s no interval short enough or location remote enough for our ancestors’ old slow world to exist unsullied by the precise modulations of smartphone and satellite. Even in the lunar interior of Antarctica, where time zones thin into meaninglessness, I lived by the tick of the warm world’s clock.

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’ve built our own expansion on the erasure of the living world, imagining (delusionally) our rapid spread to the stars even as our fellow species - the only known assemblage of life in the universe - disappears at a rate not seen since the dinosaur-killing asteroid.

We all recognize the crushing intensity of modern time, 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 movie or TV show about historical times, notice how the quick cuts from scene to scene collapse hours, days, years or even decades 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 the multiple storylines of our life 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’ll 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 foraging in a forest while listening to the wind in the leaves. You can find a library of books – from anthropology to self-help – addressing the social stresses and psychological anxieties that come from replacing life’s joy and meaning with to-do lists. For many of us, it’s a challenge simply to prevent the treadmill from picking up speed.

slowing down and awaiting the full moon / author photo

In response, we can spend more time outside, join the Slow Food movement, read Russian novels rather than watch Netflix, unschedule our kids’ lives, fly less, limit our intake of media and information, scale down our consumption of goods and services, and keep our financial ambitions modest. I’m sure you have your own strategies for living a quieter life and enjoying it more fully. Despite what the world keeps telling us, we don’t have to live inside a menu of apps that flash videos and ads 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. Head-down scrolling has replaced head-up observing, waiting, wandering, and other forms of once ordinary unscheduled existence. How many of us sit screenless and witness the world and ourselves at length? Instead, we inhale information and exhale commodified personal data.

For more than 200 years, since coal-fired trains first left the station, the powers that be have been collapsing the once-spiritual realms of space and time into a structured marketplace whose profit-driven purposes are the scheduling of activity and the mapping of information.

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. I don’t know enough about it. It seems that then, as now, quality of life was often determined by forces and powers we cannot control, by often rare opportunities for abundance and safe community, and by one’s health. What’s different now is that today’s array of forces, powers, opportunities, and definitions of health arrive not as slow wisdom but as a flood of new normals. They come from rivers of media, technology, toxic chemistry, and corporate self-interest, which must somehow be redirected to reverse the harms of the Anthropocene.

the high cost of new normals / author photo

You and I could fill a book with a partial list of the new normals that plague the new world being built for us – 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 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. For the first million years or so, our tools supplemented our lives, but now an ever-changing and ever-growing suite of technologies tumble over each other to disrupt an already turbulent existence. The world is increasingly more theirs than ours, and more unfamiliar than familiar. We’ve unleashed millions of years of stored fossil fuels in decades. Passing our population’s 8 billion mark was a blip in the news. Conditions on land, and in the atmosphere and oceans, no longer resemble anything our species has experienced.

Most of this planetary transformation 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 absorb those stories from the conversations around us. Raise us in a prison or paradise, refuge or refugee camp, villa or village, meth lab or metaverse, 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 because constant economic growth is an amoral and irrational violation of natural limits, this “successful” cascade of new normals is otherwise a sign of failure. The evidence is all around us in the violation of biological and geochemical boundaries on the only planet that can nurture us.

Yet most of us are so focused on the new normals, good or bad, of our hectic daily lives that we scarcely notice the scale of 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.

The good news is that if born into stability our descendants will normalize it. The bad news is that it will likely be several generations before they have a chance to find out.

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, nontoxic, and relatively familiar stable abundance, fairly distributed across cultures, nations, ecosystems, and species, as we seek to create a new balance with a transformed Earth.

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

the necessary future: the new making way for the old / author photo

But take heart. There are so many good signs, so much good work being done, all around us. Every biodiversity conference, 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 will allow it to support life rather than abort it. Population growth is slowing. Our empathy for wildlife and ecosystems is growing.

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 a hotter climate, less habitable oceans, and emptier continents. We’re designing a new sustainable normal on the fly, facing all sorts of opposition along the way.

We’ve been so obsessed with change for too long to find an easy way out. 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.

the right kind of growth / author photo

Thanks for sticking with me.

In other Anthropocene news:

The fate of life on Earth is up for discussion again. The latest UN Biodiversity conference (COP 16) runs October 21st to November 1st in Cali, Colombia. COP 16 participants will be following up on the promises made in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP 15. Each signatory country was required to establish a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan to match the Framework’s goals. If you want to understand the Kunming-Montreal agreement, check out my translation of the document.

In U.S. biodiversity news, the Senate has passed the WILD (Wildlife Innovation and Longevity Driver) Reauthorization Act, which supports

the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, which enables wildlife and habitat conservation in all 50 states and territories, and the Multinational Species Conservation Funds, which support the global conservation of imperiled species, including rhinos, elephants, tigers, great apes and turtles.

From the Guardian, the deeply disturbing news that in 2023, trees and land across the globe were unable to absorb our excess CO2 emissions. The oceans, too, seem to be slowing in their capacity to hide our mistakes. Why is all this (not) happening, and why have climate models failed to predict it? Because as the world warms, droughts and forest fires kill off the greenery that absorb CO2, and ocean currents slow the overturning circulation that drives absorption. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, did not mince words:

We’re seeing cracks in the resilience of the Earth’s systems. We’re seeing massive cracks on land – terrestrial ecosystems are losing their carbon store and carbon uptake capacity, but the oceans are also showing signs of instability. Nature has so far balanced our abuse. This is coming to an end.

From the brilliant

Emily Atkin

at HEATED, a brief glimpse into a topic I’m planning to explore one of these days: “Microplastics! They’re Everywhere!” From dolphin breath to a human infant’s first poop, and from the deepest ocean trench to the most remote regions of the Antarctic ice cap, microplastics are indeed everywhere. Atkin provides a good starter list. At this point, though, since these particles are ubiquitous in air, water, and soil, it may be harder to draw up a list of places they haven’t been found.

For those of you in the Pacific NW: From

Rob Lewis

at The Climate According to Life, a deep look at the natural and political complexity behind the forests of Washington and the election of a new state Lands Commissioner.

Two good-news agricultural stories from Reasons to be Cheerful: The Indian state of Sikkim has accomplished something marvelous - a complete transition of their agricultural sector to organic farming - and the Rwandan government has embraced the successful technique of “radical terracing” to stabilize rural soils and provide much more productive farmland.

The latest newsletter from Anthropocene has a few fascinating short articles on new solutions-oriented research, including: CO2-absorbing and electricity-producing artificial plants built from cyanobacteria; evidence for strong agricultural productivity from biofertilizers rather than chemical fertilizers; the environmental, financial, and social benefits of a circular construction industry (i.e. one which dismantles and reuses materials rather than demolishing and landfilling them); and a weird (to me) assessment of the value in applying investment strategies to wildlife conservation.