- Keith Farnish
Time’s Up! An Uncivilized
Solution To A Global Crisis
We were all caught up in the excitement of the battle: six of us gathered around a small portable television, variously perched on the edge of a bed or sitting on threadbare student chairs as the images of Iraqi buildings being annihilated by “Smart Bombs” were repeated more and more slowly; all the better to demonstrate the precision of advanced military technology.
“There are two hundred people in that building!” I announced, in a manner that suggested awe, over a decade before Don Rumsfeld announced that such a tactic would be used against the Hussein regime. Awe, and perhaps a little shock; but nothing compared to my feelings when a friend said the following simple words:
“They are human beings.”
Forward eighteen years, and I found myself beneath the trickling water of a Virgin Active shower, attempting to waste as little as possible while making myself clean enough for another afternoon assisting the financial engine of the civilised world in its relentless pursuit of profit. An idea struck like stage fright in my mind: “What matters is what matters to us.”
My journey from concerned environmental campaigner, handing out leaflets under railway bridges and on petrol station forecourts, to Earth Blogger in search of a cogent answer to the question of why society wasn’t trying to fix the ecological crisis, and eventually to author of a published work, was surprisingly easy. The key, I realised, was not to accept what you are told, but to make up your own mind.
It was so obvious, so blindingly obvious, that we had reached a point in the history of humanity where it was impossible to carry on in anything like the way we had up to now, or at least in the last few thousand years. The melting of the Arctic sea ice, leading to increased absorption of solar energy and enhanced greenhouse heating; the removal of vast swathes of virgin forest, causing blackwater runoff and exhausted soils; the accelerating loss of amphibians, invertebrates, fish and primates, leading to breakdowns in ecological food webs, and, worst of all, our blinkered inability to accept that we were responsible for all this.
Were we willing to switch off our own lifesupport machine?
Undoubtedly yes, but not without the urgent encouragement of the thing we had become part of: that behemoth we call Industrial Civilization. In order to destroy yourself and the lives of those you care about, you have to believe that you are doing it for the best, and that there is no alternative. That is one of the many lies this culture feeds us; the lie that there is only one way to live, and to be human is to be civilised.
Take away those lies and what are you left with? Uncivilised people, or to put it another way, people who are freely able to decide for themselves how they wish to live; people who have realised that they are connected, in the most basic way imaginable, to the rest of this “life-support machine” that encompasses all other life on Earth. In this condition, the statement that came to me under the shower which formed part of the daily routine that I left behind some two years ago – “What matters is what matters to us” – takes on a whole new meaning. What matters is that we,
as connected human beings, survive into the future, for how can anything possibly matter to us if we are not here?
