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Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein
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Climate: A New Story (edition 2018)

by Charles Eisenstein (Author)

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"Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our "fight" mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier's point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. The natural and the material world--the rivers, forests, and creatures--are sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply for carbon credits or preventing the extinction of one species versus another. After all, when you ask someone why they first became an environmentalist, they're not likely to cite humanity's existential crisis, or our society going up in flames; they're likely to point to the river they played in, the ocean they visited, the wild animals they observed, or the trees they climbed when they were a kid. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the earth. Freeing ourselves from a war mentality and seeing the bigger picture of how everything from prison reform to saving the whales can contribute to our planetary ecological health, we resist reflexive postures of solution and blame and reach toward the deep place where commitment lives"-- "Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction"--… (more)
Member:EpworthJTJ
Title:Climate: A New Story
Authors:Charles Eisenstein (Author)
Info:North Atlantic Books (2018), 320 pages
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Climate--A New Story by Charles Eisenstein

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Is Charles Eisenstein a climate change denier? It is indicative of the polarization of our times that this question might arise in your mind. “What side is he on anyways?”

Although the text of this book is about climate change, the subtext is about the climate of our collective mind. And this climate is increasingly turbulent and diametric.

I’m currently reading "Becoming Animal" by David Abram. On the back of Eisenstein’s new book, you’ll find only one testimonial, sourced from Abram. Abram’s book, published in 2010, is about sinking deeply into what it is to be human, what it is to be empathic with the animate earth. If you’re having trouble finding the heart of what Eisenstein is speaking to, this is where you’ll find it.

The book uses what some might call semantic storytelling. Eisenstein wants you to really feel what he’s talking about. Try on climate change denialism and take it for a ride. It is through this experimentation with paradigms that we can learn what feels right for us. Often times we discount views outside of our own before even taking the time to actually see how they wear. Readers might initially take these forays as endorsements, but they are not.

So what is this heart of the book that I speak of? The world is dying. Fish and insect populations have crashed by an order of magnitude. With the advent of complex life that has graced the earth in recent eons, the planet has been able to maintain a strikingly even-keeled homeostasis. Climate change signifies a degradation of this capacity. It is a very dire sign indeed when a warm-blooded animal is no longer able to maintain something as basic as its body temperature. The same could be said of the earth, and if climatologists are right, this will be getting exponentially worse in coming decades.

I remember stumbling across a short film awhile back about the dying redwoods along the West Coast of the US. Apparently a wide variety of factors have been contributed to a spike in redwood death rates. As I watched it, I started to cry. This doesn’t happen to me very often. There was something sad for me about these communities of trees that have been around far longer than we have, coming to the end of their time now.

The experience of reading Eisenstein’s book was like this for me as well. What is it like to sit with the death of so many kinds of life in our world right now? This could be the forest being logged out behind your house, or those starfish you used to remember in the Pacific Northwest, or the permafrost on Mount Washington your grandfather tells stories about. Much of the time we intellectually acknowledged such happenings, but don’t take the time to sit with them to allow our emotions and bodies to integrate these shifts.

None of this is to say the world is a static place. Eisenstein even takes the time to speak to the nationalist rhetoric emanating from the ecological restoration community’s ire towards invasive species. Novel ecosystems are now the norm, and there’s no going back to the way our colonial empire remembers the landscape. Change is inevitable, even without climate catastrophe. But Eisenstein is getting at something else here; the Anthropocene is not just another little blip in the geological record. That’s why some call it the Sixth Great Extinction.

Eisenstein debunks the efficacy of offsetting. Even solar and wind farms are a form of offsetting. In a machine paradigm, damage is more or less linear. In a living systems paradigm, damage is exponential—for a while, it seems like nothing is happening, as living systems are resilient. But then all of the sudden, the apparent capacity of an ecosystem snaps, going beyond it’s ability to remain resilient, and things spiral off in some direction.

The earth is an organism—Gaia. Each organ of Gaia is sacred and invaluable. Each forest, each estuary, each sea, is vital to the dynamic working whole. So we can’t cause damage in one place (say, the tar sands extraction), and hope to counteract it with positive measures elsewhere (say, restoration of forests in the Amazon Basin). And this is one of the reasons why regeneration is so important. We will need to work with nature to regenerative each and every ecosystem across the world if we are to hope for a livable future.

The narrative of climate change is a dangerous one. If we follow its logic, how can we stand in the way of nuclear power, geo-engineering, and eugenics? We can’t. Climate change is symptomatic of a failure of our society to establish economic and cultural norms that heed their place in the natural order, and we won’t get to the other side of this gulf by solving climate change. Eisenstein points out, humans might survive in a techno-utopian future of climate-controlled environments within a world (or solar system) otherwise devoid of life—but is that a future worth considering? Also, the techno-utopian dreamers need to find a lot more solutions than just those necessary to get us through to the other side of climate change; it is very possible that we actually do scale green energy to replace fossil fuels in fifty years’ time, only to realize ourselves in an even more dire ecological crisis due to reaching the limits of resource extraction (such as via the lithium required for batteries).

Why are we talking about climate change anyways? As Timothy Morton points out, climate change is a hyperobject—so massive in time and space as to be not only incomprehensible from the perspective of the individual, but completely unnavigable. In his own way, Eisenstein has come to the same conclusion. Ultimately, humans are simple creatures that rely on their senses and their sensibility for navigating the world. This means that local methods of inherent value are where we will find success. If you’re passionate about social justice in your community, do that. If you’re passionate about art and human connection, do that. If each of us steps into our essence, the challenge we call climate change will resolve.

If we can’t point our finger at climate change, than what can we blame? Eisenstein might suggest we consider our mentality of war. We currently have a lot of endless wars raging: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terror, and now the war on climate change. Bill McKibben went as far as to write a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone a couple years back about climate change as World War III. Liberals have even fallen into the war trap recently, with their war on Trump.

Ethics aside, there are some scenarios where wars are functional pathways to resolution, or at least towards progressing a seemingly untenable situation. But these scenarios are limited, and when it comes to situations where dichotomies are hopeless oversimplifications, fighting becomes unproductive, or even futile. Climate change may epitomize such a scenario. Addressing climate change is going to take all of us, not just those good at winning.

The conclusion of the book is somewhat striking. It outlines eighteen policies for addressing climate change. In some ways it feels as though it violates the ethic of impartiality established throughout the rest of the book, drawing a line in the sand. I’m unsure how it ended up in a text that is otherwise very much about the human experience, rather than pragmatic policies goals.

This exception aside, the beauty of Eisenstein's work is that it brings us into a space where rationality is illogical. Rationality relies upon the known, upon cause and effect. On the micro scale, there are scenarios where these simple system models actually work, such as with Newtonian physics. But on the macro scale, these methods result in confusion. Due to the interconnection of all things, cause and effect can only ever be a imperfect convenience when used to describe system dynamics. Rationality assumes cause and effect, and is an improper framework to utilize in systems.

Although it has been years in the making, this book is the most up-to-date treatise in the climate change space. Eisenstein takes his themes of respect for inner-knowing that he has been expending upon since his first book, “The Yoga of Eating,” and applies them to the issues of the day. This book is a necessary wake up call in a time where our fears and habits are clouding our vision. ( )
1 vote willszal | Oct 22, 2018 |
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"Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction With research and insight, Charles Eisenstein details how the quantification of the natural world leads to a lack of integration and our "fight" mentality. With an entire chapter unpacking the climate change denier's point of view, he advocates for expanding our exclusive focus on carbon emissions to see the broader picture beyond our short-sighted and incomplete approach. The natural and the material world--the rivers, forests, and creatures--are sacred and valuable in their own right, not simply for carbon credits or preventing the extinction of one species versus another. After all, when you ask someone why they first became an environmentalist, they're not likely to cite humanity's existential crisis, or our society going up in flames; they're likely to point to the river they played in, the ocean they visited, the wild animals they observed, or the trees they climbed when they were a kid. This refocusing away from impending catastrophe and our inevitable doom cultivates meaningful emotional and psychological connections and provides real, actionable steps to caring for the earth. Freeing ourselves from a war mentality and seeing the bigger picture of how everything from prison reform to saving the whales can contribute to our planetary ecological health, we resist reflexive postures of solution and blame and reach toward the deep place where commitment lives"-- "Flipping the script on climate change, Eisenstein makes a case for a wholesale reimagining of the framing, tactics, and goals we employ in our journey to heal from ecological destruction"--

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