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 Thom Hartman: In the last 24 hours 45,000 people on our planet
died of starvation, and 38,000 of them were children. The conventional explanation
is that this is a result of a transportation problem, or war, or things
like that, but in actuality, we are not producing enough food for the human
beings on this planet.
During these same 24 hours, 120 species have become extinct, and each of
these plants or animals were the result of billions of years of the evolutionary
process. They are gone forever. This is a rate of species loss that has
only been seen five times during the five or six billion year history of
the planet. In fact, these times were known as "the great extinctions."
There is more: In one day, 200,000 acres of rainforest also vanished, and
13 to 15 million tons of toxic waste, most of which is carcinogenic, was
dumped into our air, soil, and water.
So, we have a problem. The story we tell ourselves is that this problem
is the result of overpopulation, but there is some confusion in this explanation.
For the first 190,000 years of human history, human population around the
planet was relatively stable at anywhere from 25 to 75 million people. Then,
about seven to ten thousand years ago, we began the age of pyromania - that
is, we started using fire to smelt metal from rock, and with the help of
metal tools, we became better farmers and hunters who were more efficient
at producing food. And logically, as with any animal population, if you
increase the food supply, the numbers grow. The result was that our population
increased slowly from 50 million people up to 250 million at the time of
Christ, and we reached 500 million by the year 1000. And, somewhere between
1500 and 500 years ago, we began using ancient sunlight for the first time.
Up until then, human beings were fed, clothed, and sheltered entirely by
current sunlight -- the sunlight that falls on the earth and is absorbed
by plants, converting its energy into plant matter. There was also a 90
million year period, from 300 million years ago until 210 million years
ago, called the Carboniferous Period, when the earth was covered by enormous
plants that emitted a high level of carbon dioxide. The average temperature
was 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than now. These plants absorbed this carbon
dioxide and eventually became what we now know as coal. We started using
coal during the last 1,000 years, and now consume a million years worth
of ancient sunlight each year by burning it. Pretty amazing, when you think
about it.
Once we learned how to use ancient sunlight, we didn't have to maintain
reservoirs of current sunlight in the form of forests anymore. We could
cut forests down, use the land for crops, and produce more food -- and people.
So our population grew rapidly, and we reached a population of one billion
in the year 1800, after 290,000 years of human history. Then we became even
more efficient in our use of ancient sunlight. We began drilling oil wells,
and it took only 130 years to reach two billion. Oil could be transported
easily and burned in engines, so we could have a hundred horses pulling
a plow in the form of a tractor engine. I mean, the energy stored in a handful
of gasoline will propel a car -- thousands of pounds of steel -- for a number
of city blocks. And the oil it comes from is three to four hundred million
years old.
We reached our third billion in only 30 years, by 1960, and our fourth billion
took only 14 years -- 1974. By this time, we used ancient sunlight not only
to produce food, but also to kill off our competitors with pesticides and
herbicides. Then our fifth billion took 13 years -- 1987 -- and our sixth
took only 12 years -- 1999. If you talk to biologists and medical professionals,
they will tell you that there are only two precedents for such a steep curve,
or spike, in a biological system. The first one appears when you are periodically
measuring the pathogens in the blood system of a person suffering from a
blood-borne disease. This sudden spike, which is called amplification, means
that the patient's immune system has collapsed, allowing the pathogen, or
disease organism, to run amuck. In other words, they are about to die. The
other precedent is called cancer.
As a consequence, we have gone from consuming five per cent of the world's
fresh water and eight percent of the planet's available energy, in 1850,
to consuming over 50 per cent, which is why we are losing 120 species every
day.
They have to compete for what is left.
We may tell ourselves that this is the history of the human race and there's
nothing to be done about it, but it's actually the history of only one culture.
There are thousands of cultures around the planet that have had stable populations,
and who have not spoiled their environment, thereby putting their own lives,
and all life on earth, at risk.
This story of population growth is really the story of the world-wide culture
that uses written language, engages in commerce, and uses technology. It
includes people in China, South America, or Australia. The bad news is that
the culture is us.
As I was doing research for this book, I found that most studies of this
topic tend to focus on particular solutions. But while everybody was asking,
"what can we do about it?", nobody was asking "Why?"
And that's the question that interested me.
What I discovered is that we, as a culture, have a set of stories we hold
about who we are, why we are here and what our job or mission is. It is
radically different from the stories held by people from older cultures,
who have not experienced rapid population growth and environmental destruction.
I found this difference fascinating.
As we go through life as individuals, we collect stories about who we are,
starting virtually from birth. We collect them from our parents, our siblings,
and the myths, stories and fairy tales of our culture. The stories fit into
two basic categories: There are "I am, I can" stories that are
the foundations of our lives, and there are "I'm not, I can't"
stories that become the walls and ceiling of our world. By the time we hit
puberty, we pretty well burn these stories in, and as a result, they become
our destiny. Only rarely will people step outside of this box once it has
been created.
As a culture, we likewise hold stories that we rarely question, and I examine
some of them in my book. I'll tell you, if you want to design a culture
from the ground up with the single purpose of producing more human flesh,
we have figured out how to do it. Some cultures have created a world where
people for the most part feel safe and healthy. But not ours.
One of the first stories is that we are bad. It's called original sin. God
is angry from the get-go, and it's all the fault of a woman -- Eve, Pandora,
take your pick -- and that story has justified seven thousand years of oppression
of women and fear of our creator. This is not a functional story, in my
opinion. And as a result, we have constructed a social control mechanism
that's grounded in the notions of sin and punishment. When people misbehave,
we say that is true human nature coming through, while if they behave, that
is the result of cultural and social control. We enforce this story with
police, prisons, psychiatrists and psychiatric medications etc., . . . but
it isn't it interesting that most Aboriginal people have no police and no
prisons? Why? Because the story that says "We are evil sinners"
is alien to them. One of the most difficult challenges the Christian missionaries
have, to this day, when they reach out to Aboriginal people, is convincing
them that they are evil and God is angry at them.
Instead of the sin and punishment story, in older cultures, they talk about
balance and harmony. When people misbehave or things don't work, it is because,
somehow, harmony has been disturbed and things have been thrown out of balance.
So, if a person falls out of harmony, our job is to embrace them and bring
them back.
The second story is the one about women, and this relates to two schools
of thought about how to deal with our world-wide population explosion. One
school, the technological salvationists, think science will save us, and
say that if free birth control is available for every woman on earth, the
problem will be solved. I am not an opponent of birth control but, in fact,
according to the United Nations Population Council, all but 700 million
women on the planet have access to birth control, and we still have a problem.
Then there are the economic salvationists, who will tell you that in terms
of birth rates, Western Europe and the United States have achieved zero
population growth, and therefore, it must be that when people reach a certain
standard of living, the population stabilizes. But this ignores a couple
of realities: One is that if all six billion people on the planet lived
even at the US. poverty level of $16,000 for a family of four, we would
still need four planet Earths to provide the necessary raw materials for
them. It is simply not possible. The other reality is that there are countries
with per capita incomes much higher than ours, such as some of the oil-rich
countries, where the population is exploding.
When I dug into this, I discovered one variable that determines the growth
of population in a culture: When women have equal power with men, the population
stabilizes, and in those nations where women are bought and sold like cattle,
regardless of their wealth or technology, the population explodes. It is
as simple as that.
Another story that we tell ourselves is that we are here, and divinity is
"up there," or in a box we call a church, synagogue, or temple
that we visit periodically, usually with some trepidation. This story serves
to disconnect us from our power, and our spirituality. I remember the first
time I met somebody who lives inside the older culture story, instead of
the one our society believes. I was sitting in a dry riverbed, talking through
a translator with Tommy George, a 90-year old Aboriginal king. I was asking
about "spirit," and "sacred places," which led to a
lengthy exchange between Tommy George and the translator, back and forth
and back and forth. Finally I asked, "What's going on?" and the
translator replied, "I had to explain your concept. They don't have
a word for sacred." "Why?", I asked. "Because there
is nothing that isn't sacred," was the reply. "They don't make
the distinction."
Another dysfunctional story is that we are "in here" and nature
is not only "out there," but it is inferior. Since we are superior,
having been given dominion by our creator, we can control and manipulate
it. But when I asked Tommy George a question about nature, he went into
another long exchange with the translator. The reason? "They don't
have a word for nature, because there isn't any 'not nature.' Everything
is, so there is no need for the word. Humans, animals, plants, soil, the
sky -- it's all one thing."
What can we do? Well, it is amazing how rapidly change happens once the
stories change. We carried two stories for seven thousand years, that we
upended in a very short space of time. One was that it is alright to have
slaves, the other was that women are lower than men. Indeed, women in the
United States could not even vote until 1920, and it was only two hundred
years ago that slavery was challenged, leading to the Civil War. So when
Abraham Lincoln met Hariet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
he said, "Oh, so you're the little lady who started this war."
With the increased velocity of communications, thanks to technology such
as the internet, the power to spread new stories is tremendous. We don't
even need to create new stories -- they already exist and, in fact, humanity
lived by these "alternatives" for 190,000 years. I don't think
it will take an enormous number of people -- we just have to reach critical
mass. So if we hear the wake-up call, and share the message with others,
then change is possible. That will create a better world for our children's
children than the one we are preparing now. The stakes are very, very high,
but if we do it, it will be a phenomenal thing.
 The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking
Up to Personal and Global Transformation
By Tom Hartmann
$24.00. 314 pp. cloth. ISBN
0609605461.
Harmony $14.00. 314 pp. paper. ISBN
0609805290.
Three Roses Press
This book contains both
a disturbing message and a hopeful one. The disturbing message is that the
world economy is rapidly using up its inheritance of "ancient sunlight"
-- the energy contained in coal and oil -- while damaging the soil, poisoning
the air and water, and very possibly, turning up the global thermostat by
several degrees. And we are ignoring these urgent problems, even as thousands
of people die of starvation and dozens of species become extinct every day.
How did we get into such a mess? According to Thom Hartmann, a psychotherapist,
our problems originate in the stories embraced by our culture about our
identity and place in the world. However, hope lies in the stories of many
indigenous or older cultures. In their stories, human beings live in harmony
and balance with the natural world, and with each other.
Hartmann traveled around the world and became deeply acquainted with the
people who still live in the "old ways." Though he realizes that
the modern world cannot simply turn the clock back, and admits that ancient
cultures were far from perfect, he asks us to consider the following: Many
older cultures had more leisure time, less poverty, little crime, a more
diverse and healthy diet, less degenerative disease, a society that valued
co-operation and mutual respect, a sustainable relationship with the natural
world that continued for hundreds or thousands of years, and even better
teeth. So one might ask: who is primitive, and who is sophisticated?
The special value of this book is that it challenges us to step outside
of our shared assumptions and ask: Is this present life really the one we
want to live? And if we continue living as we do now, what will it do to
our world of air, soil, water, and other resources, not to mention the lives
of several billion people now living on about two dollars a day? -- JC |
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