The Stories We Tell

Reframing shifts, shifting frames

Derrellwilliams, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

We humans are creatures of story – individually, collectively, globally. Our stories unite and divide us, paralyze and transform us, keep us limited or open us to new possibilities.

I find myself, in this time, contemplating two of these stories: one in which we have woven unhelpful narratives of guilt and shame, and another in which we have woven narratives of amorality that obfuscate the impacts of our choices – where some guilt and shame might actually be helpful.

The first is the story of climate change and “climate-induced natural disasters.” These days, whenever there is a wildfire or a hurricane or a flood or a drought, scientists chime in to opine that, yes, this is almost certainly due to climate change. And then the news and my social media feeds fill up with hand-wringing about how our planet is on a fast track to hell and it’s all our fault and we needed to take action yesterday but we didn’t but we can still make a difference if we all do our part starting tomorrow.

I don’t doubt that climate change is real, and that it’s at least somewhat connected to the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the atmosphere, but I’d like to explore a different story.

We inhabit a dynamic, living planet. Parts of this planet are always being wiped clean, re-made by wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, lava flows, eruptions, floods, droughts, glaciers, windstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides. It is hubris to believe we can control them, and it is equally hubris – I feel - to believe that we are responsible for them. Climate change may be shifting the location, timing, and frequency of some of these events, but it is not causing them. They have been ongoing since long before the age of dinosaurs. It also feels strange to me to say that these events have victims, as if then either Earth herself is a perpetrator, or we are through our climate impacts. Perhaps it would be easier to accept, with grace, that wherever we live we might someday need to flee, to adapt, to start over, to rebuild. Perhaps we might also learn to be more attuned to where we choose to build our permanent homes, to avoid the floodplains and mountainsides and coastlines and barrier islands and chaparral hills, or to accept that if we build in these places we may need to surrender, evacuate, start over more often.

We also are far from the first species to shift atmospheric chemistry. First prize, earliest in time and largest in magnitude, goes to the cyanobacteria who somehow evolved the miraculous and complex machinery of photosynthesis, emitting oxygen “pollution” that precipitated iron out of the oceans into the deposits we are now mining, that spelled the end for many species while creating new evolutionary possibilities. Honorable mentions go to the vast forests of the Carboniferous Period that outpaced decomposition and converted atmospheric carbon into coal, and to the many calcite-shelled marine organisms that transform carbon into limestone.

On geologic timescales, Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past 50 million years, only recently entering a cold snap in which ice ages became possible. Fifty million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations were four times today’s levels, global average temperatures were almost 20ºF warmer, the poles had no ice caps, and yet life continued to thrive and our ancestor mammals continued to evolve. The shift in atmospheric chemistry currently underway is disruptive, but it is not leading to unprecedented territory, and it does not threaten a thermal runaway that will lead to a lifeless Venus-like planet. Perhaps it was inevitable that the species that mastered fire would ultimately discover and burn the combustible remains of ancient photosynthesis, would shift the planet from a pattern of recurring ice ages to one where ice is a rarity. And however the climate shifts in this time, it will ultimately be woven into the long story of our middle-aged planetary home, resulting in both destruction and creation, extinction and speciation.

Finally, it is fair to say that the human meta-organism is carbonotrophic. Which is to say, burning fossil fuels is a large part of what we do, at this stage in our evolution. There seems to be an assumption that if we can get CFCs out of refrigerators and asbestos out of ceilings, we can get fossil fuels out of our lives, and our failure to do so reflects a failure within ourselves. But CFCs and asbestos were merely convenient for some uses, readily replaced, whereas our entire modern lives are powered largely by coal, oil, and natural gas. Even when we electrify our homes and vehicles, that electricity is largely produced with fossil fuels. And even when we build out massive wind and solar installations, those turbines and panels are fabricated, transported, constructed, and ultimately dismantled using fossil fuels.

There is a great deal of waste and unnecessary energy use, and it would help substantially if we could learn to honor the gift of energy, to live more simply and less consumptively. And yet, even if we all made those choices, we would not stop extracting and burning fossil fuels. So much of our energy use simply produces and delivers and cooks our food, heats and cools our homes and businesses, carries us across distance, is embodied within our buildings and clothes and vehicles. In the context of continuing population growth and global development, significant and rapid cuts in carbon emissions simply are not possible at this time, absent some draconian global austerity program whose consequences would far outweigh any benefits.

Humanity will evolve beyond fossil fuels over the next century or two, simply because we will use them up, and the remaining deposits will become ever more precious, ever more difficult to access. Perhaps we will be able to evolve beyond them before we use them all up, but however the future unfolds, it will happen collectively, as billions of human souls evolve and make choices, as visionaries and inventors explore new possibilities, as the planetary consciousness we live within makes her own tectonic and biospheric and electromagnetic choices. It will not happen because we felt worse about it or shouted louder for action.

It pains me to see so many people paralyzed by guilt and shame and fear and grief over climate change. It saddens me to see us wall ourselves off from a deeper sense of belonging on Earth, from spiritual connection to our planet, because we see ourselves as fundamentally destructive, as perpetrators, as unworthy. We don’t have to tell the story that way. It is not helpful to view climate change as a problem to be solved. It is not helpful to now blame ourselves for fires and hurricanes and floods, simply because the shifting climate has shifted their patterns. We can instead frame climate change as a reality to which we must adapt, a reality to which we can help each other and other species adapt, a reminder that we are – like it or not – participants in the collective weaving of Earth’s story. That we might choose to embrace rather than reject that participation. That we might, over time, become conscious collaborators, co-creators in the grand dance of evolution.

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While we cannot in any meaningful way reduce global carbon emissions through actions in my town, home to one one-hundred-thousandth of the human population, there is another story to which some of that guilt and shame and grief could be transposed, where these emotions are strangely absent, where there is real potential for immediate change and so they could be transformative rather than paralyzing.

This is the story of economics, the story that would claim to justify a reality in which some humans in my town live in mansions and own beach homes while others are deeply in debt and struggling to pay rent, and in which the humans who own multiple homes can actively extract wealth from the struggling humans while maintaining respect and feeling no shame within themselves.

While we are not the only species in Earth’s history to reshape ecosystems and shift atmospheric chemistry, we are almost certainly the only species in Earth’s history to systematically hoard resources and extract wealth from our kin, to establish a society in which some members have a million times more wealth than others, in which there are sufficient resources for all to thrive and yet many are locked in a perpetual struggle to meet basic needs.

Those on the political left would like to bolster government safety nets to provide food and shelter and services to folks in need. Those on the political right tend to rely on churches and community aid networks and also to believe that impoverished folks are responsible for their own suffering. Almost no one questions the story that creates wealth and poverty in the first place: a story that we could choose to shift at any time.

The story is this. A free market determines a fair price for goods and services. Within that free market and within the bounds of the law, all wealth acquired is fairly earned and there is no occasion for moral judgment. Our goal in life is therefore to compete and succeed within this system, to get a degree and a career and save and invest money and buy a house and retire to a life of leisure.

Step outside of that story with me for a moment.

If I am an artist or a musician or an author, or I run a bowling alley or a ski resort or a sports arena, I exist in a free market. If I charge too much, my customers will simply walk away. If I sell ten million copies and make ten million dollars, I will have done so honestly, with all of those people freely choosing to offer me their resources in return for my wisdom or creativity.

If I am a landlord or a surgeon or a medicine maker, my market is not free. My customers will willingly pay their life savings and go into debt to access my services. If the market isn’t free, then morality applies. Or it certainly ought to.

If I own an apartment building, and my per-unit monthly cost (fixed expenses plus a living wage for labor) is $600, and I’m charging $1500, and I’m buying fancy cars and more properties while my tenants tread water and rack up debt and abandon hopes of ever owning a home, then I don’t have tenants, I have victims.

If I run a hospital, and all of my doctors and administrators have big houses on the hill, and a couple from the trailer park arrives badly injured from an accident that totaled their car, and I mend their bodies and then send them home with a bill that is three times what I charge my insured patients, and that bill wipes out their meager savings and lands them on the street, then I don’t have patients, I have victims.

If I’m a successful, wealthy business owner, and my employees earn minimum wage and live in old RVs and qualify for food stamps, then I don’t have workers, I have victims.

We can keep trying to implement systems and safety nets so the people who have had all of their wealth extracted don’t freeze or starve, or we can stop victimizing our neighbors already.

What would that look like?

“I am no longer comfortable accumulating wealth through renting property. Effective next month, your rent will be decreasing by 50%.” (I actually did this, more or less, with a property I co-own. It feels a lot better than charging market rate…)

“Your hospital bill that would have been $30,000 is now $3,000, and if you can’t afford it we can tap into our community fund.”

“Effective next month all employees will earn at least $25/hr. My compensation and supervisor salaries will be trimmed accordingly.”

If we work really hard and plant thousands of trees and all commute by bike, we can maybe reduce the impact of climate change by a few percentage points over the next century. If we simply choose to stop extracting wealth from each other, to shift the frame of the economic story, we can restructure society tomorrow. We can create a world in which those who accumulate wealth at others’ expense are no longer respected but shunned, in which they find it hard to live with themselves until they change course.

Whatever we might think of the politics and policies, the fact that we just inaugurated a president with $7 billion net worth, who has tapped the world’s richest man (worth $421 billion) for his cabinet, means that we still freely grant power and respect to those who are most adept at extracting and accumulating wealth.

How about we change that?

How about we transfer the shame and guilt and grief we’re feeling about our impact on the climate, and start feeling it about the impact we’re having on our fellow citizens? And then instead of being paralyzing it can be transformative, because while we can’t really stop heating our houses and we would rather not skip flying home for Christmas, it’s not that hard to stop extracting wealth, to choose instead to earn a fair wage for our time, to treat housing and health care as a public service rather than a profit center, to pay our workers equitably, to stop seeking more and be satisfied with enough, to replace the empty thrill of buying a new toy or a bigger house with the deep satisfaction of contributing to a thriving community.

We clearly have a long ways to go, but there are many shifts afoot in this time, many awakenings, old stories beginning to unravel. I will be seeking a new home, building new community in the year ahead, and I am hopeful that I can join others working to tell new stories, to explore new possibilities. I am hopeful that we can begin to sow seeds of a new paradigm, even as the old one teeters on the brink of collapse.