The summer of our discontent

The gothic architecture of a church on lower Manhattan stands out among the fires as the island tips into the Atlantic. On the right: what seemed to be a better future for big cities until we realized the inherent density problem.

ecollective graphic

Editorial

For the city that never sleeps, it was a surreal nightmare. Wildfires raging in Eastern Canada turned the Manhattan skyline red in June 2023. Red sky at mid-day was only happening in California and Orgeon, or so thought New Yorkers in alarm. But as the skies cleared, the alarm passed and yet another sign of increasing environmental disaster faded into dim collective memory.

An also grave but less apparent circumstance is that lower Manhattan and Brooklyn are sinking from rising sea levels and the weight of the built environment. 

A few years later, pressures from sea rising into sinking landmass suddenly cause gas and electrical grids in lower Manhattan and east Brooklyn to collapse which ripple into electrical and gas line breaks and fires.  Mass panic and death ensues as large areas of the city and borough go up in flames.

That's a vision that seems imminently possible in summer 2023.

The illustrated vision imagines the form that the big USA wake up call finally takes after a long series of environmental disasters lulled us into normalizing our reactions to the now familiar yet extreme weather events.

The terraced urban landscape at the golden time of day (above) seemed like an optimal future for big cities until we realized that well-planned mitigation of hugely concentrated populations was an even better solution. Less urban density equals more space to grow and thrive.

Since I was very small I have felt that everything, in the natural world, is made of love,”

Alice Walker, August 17, 2023 (comment posted on her website)

In the early 1990s, when Octavia Butler was writing the dystopian novel, Parable of the Sower, Alice Walker was writing the young readers' book, Finding the Green Stone.  Butler’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina is a teenager who feels the pain of others from a congenital condition called “hyper-empathy.” Walker’s central character is a selfish boy who painfully suffers from his lack of empathy.  

The shared point of these two books is an obvious truth that we need to be reminded of: when people routinely prioritize self-interest over collective interest, everyone loses.

The Parable of the Sower takes place between 2024 and 2027, when due to growing wealth inequality, drug addiction, failing national and local governance, corporate greed, and climate change, U.S. society descends into chaos.

Reacting to the crises raging around her, Lauren Olamina posits "God is change" as the central tenet of the Earthseed philosophy that she develops in her journal. 

As she matured, Lauren probably would have come to regard God, not as change, but as the still, silent source of change –  absolute stillness is the emptiness out of which everything emerges and into which everything dissolves.

However in the context of this editorial, "God as change" can be interpreted as a call to action to address the multiple crises facing our planet in 2023. 

 We are living in times that are becoming as catastrophic as those described in The Parable of the Sower.

Gunning down people in public places is so commonplace in the U.S. that many younger Americans don’t realize that there was a time within their parents’ or grandparents’ lifetimes when there were no mass shootings. After steadily increasing for decades, U.S. life expectancy is now decreasing. The situations of migrants at our southern borders and the circumstances they’re fleeing in Central America (part of our own land mass) sound wretched like those of the people outside of the walled communities in the Parable of the Sower. 

Water scarcity— or rather, unnecessary water scarcity, rising sea levels, extreme weather events, a growing number of unhoused people dying in the streets, and fentanyl addiction are now crises, or variants of crises, that Butler foresaw in the early 1990s.

In addition to those are the crises of masculinity, rise of epidemics, rising acts of white supremacy in this country, glaring income inequality (white people with high school degrees earn twice as much as black people with college degrees), alienation between young black men and young black women and the resulting “divestment movement,” Donald Trump’s stranglehold on a large segment of the population, the war in Europe and countless geopolitical crises around the world. And on and on the omens go. 

 Scientists estimate that a million plants and animals are at risk of extinction as humans plow and pave over land, overfish the seas and overheat the planet.

 Signs of the times in our local area: around the same time that the Hampton VA police chief called a press conference to issue a statement about January 2023 being the month of the highest number of homicides in the city’s history, a six-year boy in Newport News brought a gun to school and shot his teacher. During winter 2022-2023, in Virginia and much of the mid-Atlantic, for the first time, there was no snow.

As the nation collapses in 2027, the seed for a new way of life planted by Lauren Olamina in the form of what, if it survived, could become an intentional community: a small community of survivors committed to each others' continued survival, called “Acorn.”  An intentional community is a planned residential community based on teamwork and often also on environmentalist principles.

Findhorn is a well-known intentional community in Scotland. The wind turbines at Findhorn make the Ecovillage a net exporter of electricity.  (Photo: W. L. Tarbert, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tilting precariously on this unprecedented inflection point in our nation’s history, can we imagine such intentional "acorns" and variants of this cooperative model, as grassroots ways of addressing the polycrises?   

Writing from the Birmingham prison in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr envisioned the social aspect of what biologists would soon call “ecological systems”: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he wrote. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Caring for the Earth and all her beings is both a moral imperative and a necessity for survival. The health of any one person or species is dependent on the health of the Whole. Can we unite to enact a comprehensive political vision based on mutuality? Or are we doomed to be vanquished by egocentricity?