The challenges we confront are immense, but not insurmountable. Alternative paths leading towards solutions exist. Landcare is safest and most rewarding of these paths, but it will be difficult steer our culture along that path because traveling it requires change and sacrifice.
When confronting life challenges, many people simply give up. They refuse to consider an alternative path for their lives. They say no to change, on principle, and suffer the consequences, be it a failed marriage, sickness, or bankruptcy. Other people honestly consider the difficult questions being asked, accept the challenge, construct a new path into the future, and thrive in the new life they’ve created. Aaron Antonovsky, in his landmark studies of health, stress, and coping, sought to explain why some people thrive in the face of adversity and others don’t. He identified three tendencies of survivors, three characteristics typical of people that successfully navigate a path out from failed marriages, layoffs, persecution, and threats to life and lifestyle.
- First, survivors see the challenges confronting them. They possess or find sufficient information to make informed decisions about upcoming risks and opportunities. They see a pathway that leads them out of harms way, at least its beginnings, and are aware of the need to take it.
- Second, they have resources. They have access to money, faith, friends, media, government programs, technical skills and other sources of support. They have time and physical ability to respond. They have or can build capacity.
- Third, they have reason to respond. They have a purposeful life, one filled with meaning. They believe their lives make a difference and thus possess the will to act, to care, to sacrifice. They are willing to ask hard questions about the path they are on and have the courage to alter their journey.
All three characteristics are present in people that overcome life’s obstacles, stay healthy and thrive. The third is perhaps the most critical, and the hardest to affect. Let’s look at each in the context of the challenges that face us as a nation.
America is awash with indicators of alarm. We have access to an overwhelming array of information about degrading social, economic, and environmental conditions. Satellites report retreating glaciers and eroding forests. Economists confirm the widening gap between rich and poor, and our mounting debt. Maps show the sprawl of suburbia and the paving of green infrastructure. Engineers document the decay of bridges, waterways and other build infrastructure. Defense experts lament heightening global insecurities and declining defense capabilities. Scientists report collapsing fisheries and weakening ecosystem functions. We can always use better information, and certainly need assistance disentangling conflicting claims and disinformation campaigns, but lack of information is not our problem.
America has ample capacity. We are rich. We have one of the most trusted and effective governments, ever. We have an educated population that respects rules of law protecting our respected constitutional rights. We have police, fire, and regulatory agencies that can protect us from selfish rouge elements that don’t care about our common future. We have creative scientists and engineers. We have a market system that rewards success. We are far from perfect and there is considerable room for improvement, but we possess exceptional capabilities to respond to the challenges at hand.
But do we possess the will to act? America, and more importantly, Americans, seem paralyzed by the challenges confronting us. Some fault is certainly due to the polarizing and venomous rhetoric that demeans questions about the path we are on, questions that necessarily challenge the privileged positions of people in power. Civil debate is scarce. We have abandoned the search for the common ground on which our strength is built. Instead, we have fallen into the habit of attacking the questioner and denouncing their credibility and sincerity. The magnitude of this challenge to deliberative democracy cannot be overstated; we must find ways to overcome our divisiveness and stop rewarding and celebrating those who divide. We must remember the hard earned lessons that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
Still more importantly, and the ultimate focus of this blog, is the need for individuals to possess the will to act, the motivation to negotiate, chart, and then take the path that most likely leads to a thriving and sustainable future, however difficult that path may be. We must care. A helpless and overwhelmed citizenry is ripe for exploitation by individuals, corporations, countries, and agencies that see and seize opportunities to increase their power as others founder in chaos and apathy.
One source of motivation is fear: fear of rising seas, deformed babies, body burdens, collapsed fisheries, war, famine, and the litany of environmental alarms. But social psychologists warn us that fear is a fickle motivator. Flight or fight urges sometimes evoke superhuman capabilities. People lift enormous weight, run great speeds, and take on imposing challengers and impossible odds when adrenaline flows and attention focuses. But the fear response is also unpredictable, short-lived, and often not rational. The challenges we face require a sustained effort and we can’t risk running the herd off a cliff.
Instead of fear we need hope, we need a vision of a better place, somewhere we want to live in the future, and will sacrifice for now, in return for believing the future will be better for it. Negotiating such a future is the challenge and bane of constructing sustainability. It requires that we agree the future matters, and that we agree on at least some of the values we want to define that future. These tasks are not just exceptionally difficult, they are philosophically and politically contentious. The dominant philosophy and social science of our day—economics— is biased against this task. It elevates the metric of money as wielded by individuals above all else. Thus, the discipline from which we need great help in designing a compelling vision of a sustainable future is fundamentally opposed, or at least agnostic, to the tasks of explicitly negotiating the path we need to follow. It rather leave that decision to the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s market, it rather our future be determined by countless, independent, partially informed, greed-driven decisions rather than a deliberate political decision based on values and principles. I am not denying that fiscal capital is an essential and necessary component of sustainability, on the contrary, I accept it as necessary but not sufficient. We also need to be motivated by more than selfish greed. Recall the old fable:
A man came upon workers at a construction site. He asked one man, with the slumped body language of someone resenting his work, “What are you doing?” and the man answered, “I am laying bricks so I get paid.” He asked a second man, whose posture and humming suggested enthusiasm for his task, “What are you doing?” The man answered, “I am building a cathedral!”
Jesus and Mohammed told stories, so did Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Stories define a vision and build the will to create a future. Stories instill courage and sacrifice. They provide the will to use the capabilities we possess to address the challenges we see. The theologian, environmentalist, and master storyteller Thomas Berry argued in Dream of the Earth that we need a new story to guide and discipline us as we move into the future.
It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in-between stories. The Old Story – the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story…We need a story that will educate us, a story that will guide, heal and discipline us. (p123)
Thomas Friedman, another powerful storyteller, also laments America’s loss of direction. In his best-seller Hot Flat and Crowded he crafts a new, inspiring, patriotic story about living in and leading a world challenged by climate change, globalizing economy, and resource scarcities.
We need a story about a new path leading to a new future. The story must be about more absolving responsibility to mindless pursuit of greater wealth and productive capacity—yes, we need wealth and capacity, but we need it for something. We need to focus on what that future is. We need a path leading to someplace tempting—where we will want to live in the future and will willingly, proudly sacrifice to get there.
We are, as David Brooks argues in his new book, a social animal, not an economic one. The choices of living cannot be separated from choices of building a society, they cannot be reduced to consumption and economic growth. These choices require defining and acting on communal values and concerns, understood through story. Sustainability represents a commitment to the future. It is an investment in institutions, things, and places we value. Sustainability means commitment to one another and to the biosphere. It means care. Landcare.