33: Smaller, slower

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In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves

Vanitas still life with a globe, sceptre, a skull crowned with straw, Hendrick Andriessen, c. 1650

One of the big ideas echoing around the world right now, because we live in this weird time when everyone is always thinking about the same thing, is that in some yet to be understood ways we are on the brink of a restructuring of society. Depending on your outlook this might be a source of hope, or cynicism, and I imagine for pretty much everybody, anxiety.

I was listening to an interview with Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the BU School of Public Health, who is a scholar of the social determinants of health, and back in March he was saying this pandemic could be one of those generational moments when our outlook on the world changes forever, citing 9/11 and the AIDS epidemic as previous examples. In his case, he was hoping one outcome will be a better understanding that there’s no such thing as “health for some” and that public health is a shared good.

There’s a temptation to think of these moments as opportunities for a triumphant recovery and leap forward. But that’s never quite the case, is it? As we learned from the post-9/11 era, change doesn’t happen like that. Some good things happen, some bad things happen, some things go back to the way they were.

I really like the way Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote about this recently as she was coming to grips with the hollow promise that things always get better.

So I look a bit further, and I find these words, from Alondra Nelson, a historian, in a recent interview: “The great mythos of American life is the idea that we’re always improving, always moving forward. And the great story of science and technology is that it is also always leaping forward to good ends.”

She notes that we have “an overinvestment in a progress narrative — particularly with regards to racial politics, issues of gender equality and equity — without sufficient attention to the fact that there’s the falling backward as much as there are leaps forward” and that “this political moment should be one of humility, of paying attention to looping back, and of acknowledging that sometimes looping back means failure, means going back to the woodshed, means throwing out what we thought we knew and thinking again.”

Farhad Ebrahimi, founder of the Chorus Foundation and someone I’ve talked with a lot over the years about climate justice and social movements, likes to use an analogy that I’m going to steal from him because it feels similarly appropriate. It’s the science fiction trope of the gravity temporarily going off in the spaceship, and everything suddenly becoming weightless, floating around, massive objects hurtling across the room. But the gravity inevitably comes on again, and everything crashes back to the ground with its full weight.

He uses it to refer to fast-moving, “movement moments” that happen periodically in social change work, but I think it also applies to any time of general upheaval and change. Right now, for example, the gravity is off. We’re experiencing the terror of floating around in space untethered, while also wondering how we should move some things around before the gravity comes back on—what we want the new status quo to look like once everything falls back to the ground.

Last week I talked about how exposed public health inequalities and societal vulnerabilities are one reason people are saying that now is not the time to back off on climate action. This is another: During a crisis, everything is on the table—for a while.

The big obvious thing here is the extent to which we try to take the moment to transition away from oil and gas. But lately I’ve been thinking how it might lead to a shift in our overall perceptions of consumption and economic growth, and how that’s manifesting in my own experience. While not all pandemic solutions are aligned with climate solutions, I wonder if a smaller, slower economy might be one that serves both, and maybe leads to a better way of life.

This is actually related to a pretty heated debate in climate circles. So there’s one crowd that says climate change is just another thing we have to figure out and it will be hard but we’ll innovate our way out of it and continue our general upward trajectory of better technology and economic growth. Another crowd says, actually, climate change is indicative of a sick relationship we have with the planet and its resources—overconsumption, consolidation of wealth, corporate globalization, industrial agriculture, loss of biodiversity.

If you’ve read any of my other emails or just the way I wrote that last sentence, you will rightly suspect that I lean toward the latter story, but like all of these stark divides on climate, I think there’s some truth in both. The idea that we should somehow dial back technology and standard of living and return to some kind of agrarian society seems both impossible and undesirable (Bill McKibben is a climate hero, but he lives in rural Vermont and that says a lot if you know anything about rural Vermont, and I once heard him say in an interview that in some ways maybe life wasn’t so bad in the Middle Ages it’s like come on Bill McKibben).

But coronavirus—and the urbanization, deforestation, and trade of wildlife that spark pandemics like it—casts a firm vote for the idea that our relationship with our surroundings is broken. It’s one consequence of what’s been called the “Great Acceleration,” a rapid expansion since the middle of the 20th century in human energy use, emissions, and population growth. We’ve reached a point where people, some people at least, go everywhere all the time and have anything they want, and it just can’t continue. As Kate Brown put it in a recent article on the ecological factors behind a pandemic, “In an effort to expand our reach across the planet, we have cornered ourselves.”

I guess this is a pretty traditional concept in environmentalism, one of anti-consumption, but I don’t think the answer is we all just tighten our belts or go and live in the woods like Michael McKean in The Good Place. So I don’t know, I think it has to be both. We can’t go backwards, but we can’t continue the same way. We have to make it different, better.

Right before things started getting bad, I read this opinion by economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, who made a case for abandoning growth of GDP as our measure of success. For one, he cites data that says if we carry on economic growth as usual, the rate of decarbonization required becomes far outside the realm of possibility. Keep in mind that, as renewable energy has rapidly expanded, burning of carbon has still well outpaced it.

But besides the climate argument, he writes, “Beyond a certain point, which high-income countries have long since surpassed, the relationship between GDP and human wellbeing completely breaks down.” There are several examples of countries with GDPs a fraction of our own having much better life expectancies, education, healthcare, and investments in public goods. That’s largely because when economic growth gets to a certain point, the vast majority is going straight to the wealthy, so you get this split economy of a top tier reaping massive rewards of growth, with everyone else scrambling at unsustainable levels of busyness just to cover expenses. Hickel proposes economies with less material production (and therefore emissions), less consumption, less planned obsolescence, and eliminating massive intentional inefficiencies built into our current economy—and yes, less work. Just. Less.

I think a lot of us right now are feeling what this kind of contraction might be like, sort of unintentionally trying on different aspects of it to see how they fit. That includes traveling less, shrinking our workloads through lightened expectations, or unfortunately, furlough and layoff. We’re slowing down, pruning our lives back. We’re buying less, burning less, trying to figure out how to sit around and do nothing more. For me, for corona- and non-corona-related reasons, this has been a slower than usual month for work, so it’s been little things like waking up without an alarm, not tracking all my working hours with productivity apps. I spend two hours every day reading. When I want to buy something, I know I can’t have it in on my doorstep in exchange for a relative pittance and in mere hours, but instead now it’s maybe weeks or maybe it’s not available at all, so I rethink it. These are all surprisingly uncomfortable things and they feel weird.

You always want to be careful with this talk, for one because my kind of experience is an enormous privilege that is only accessible to people in very fortunate positions. And even if crisis is changing our perceptions, the still-baked-in inequality means that for many others, life is only faster, harder, and worse. You don’t want to glamorize poverty, and the temptation to celebrate silver lining environmental benefits of human tragedy is a form of eco-fascism. Nobody should look around at how things are now and say, yeah this right here is the way I want life to be. The clear skies may be nice, but this is a nightmarish way to get there.

If this isn’t the way life should be, though, I’m thinking about how personally and on larger level, we might take some new habits and perceptions away from this tragedy, and use them to shift things into the way we do want life to be, one that is maybe smaller, slower, and hopefully better.

Watching

The other day this video came up on my Facebook feed and it’s 2:43 minutes and my attention span is basically fried these days I read like 50 articles and 1 million tweets a day. But this little video is so beautiful and a couple times during it I found myself clicking away to something else and then I was like you know what just sit down and watch these fucking elk for two minutes and forty three seconds with the sound on you deserve it. So I did and I encourage you to do the same.

Links

An amabie from a woodblock print, late Edo period

Listening

I recently found out about this musician Hailu Mergia, who I guess is a keyboardist but he plays all kinds of things he did an accordion record and originally was famous in Ethiopia during the 80s for his role in the Walias Band. They played jazz and funk mixed with traditional Ethiopian music. Anyway he has this wild story where he tried to make it in the US, didn’t have much success so drove a cab for years in DC, then was rediscovered in 2013 and has been putting out new music since.

This song is a little different than most of his music, more quiet contemporary jazz but with these unique rhythms and layered melodies in there. The other day I got stuck listening to it on repeat for like a half hour and it kind of put me into a trance. The song title means “singing about love” the kind of wistful humming you might do about a distant loved one.

Finally, I want to close this week with a video from the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is where Jamie borat voice my wife works which is why wherever we (used to) go random people thank her and ask if they can give her a hug. NNAF made this video with Padma Lakshmi and Molly Crabapple and it’s a really powerful message about access to abortion but also just about imagining a world where we treat each other with love. Here it is:

Take care out there folks. If you can, slow things down, prune things back, and see how it feels. Watch the elk and listen to the piano song as many times as you want. You deserve it.

Tate