Grieving a world we no longer have
Grieving a world that I have never experienced because of humanity’s unquenchable need to destroy, take, consume, and conquer. And how we can bring this world back again.
Can you remember one of those rare days when you go into nature, really into nature? Not just meandering around your local green space or cycling along a river, not just visiting a country park or walking along the edge of a pesticide-spritzed farmer’s field, but real nature? What we would dub an “area of outstanding natural beauty”, a place where you can’t hear any cars, you can’t see any buildings. A place where your heart finally fills with peace, where it feels like you can fully breathe, where you just feel…unreasonably happy?
I get to experience days like this probably a handful of times a year. Days where I’ve managed to rope in a friend or relative with a car (because these places are rarely accessible using public transport links) and we spend a few hours in paradise, saying we will come back more often “we’ll definitely make this a monthly thing” feeling absolutely elated, thinking that maybe life ain’t so bad. Then we drive home and promptly forget about these places as we jump back into the routines of “normal” life.
This experience made me think about Climate by Charle Eisenstein, sharing an excerpt of Steve Nicholl’s Paradise Found which describes explorers who gave testimony of their arrival into North America, before colonisation, and how they thought they had discovered a paradise.
“Atlantic salmon runs so abundant no one is able to sleep for their noise. Islands as full as birds as a meadow is full of grass. An island covered by so many egrets that the bushes appeared pure white. Swans so plentiful the shores appear to be dressed in white drapery. Colonies of Eskimo curlews so thick it looked like the land was smoking. White pines two hundred feet high. Spruce trees twenty feet in circumference. Black oaks thirty feet in girth. Hollowed-out sycamores able to shelter thirty men in a storm. Cod weighing two hundred pounds (today they weigh perhaps ten\0. Cod fisheries where the number of cod seems equal that of the grains of sand. A man who reported more than six hundred fish could be taken with a single cast of the net, and one fish was so big that twelve colonists on dine on it and have some left.”
When I first read this, I felt a deep pull of longing when I read that. Longing for a time I never experienced, a country I never visited, a world I struggle to even imagine. But I also felt such disbelief, that’s just a fantasy, right? My longing for this feels the same as when I was 8 and wanted to go to Hogwarts, or when I was 11 and wanted a vampire boyfriend, it’s just not real.
We like to assume how life is now is how it has always been–and how it always will be. It’s as if we can’t miss the former beauty of the world because we have never known it, we can’t even imagine it. But I feel this missing shows up in different ways. A hunger for something unidentifiable. A void in our stomachs, in our hearts.
That void is real. We’re the richest we’ve ever been, but we’re more depressed than ever. We have a scarcity of time, beauty, intimacy, and connection. No amount of social media likes, clothes, money, status, or cars can meet our unfulfilled needs.
Sometimes I fear the Bill-Gates-Elon-Musk-funded-technomodernist-and-ecomodernist future more than the disaster of climate change itself. I fear a future where we live in a bubble city protected from the sun’s extra harsh rays, where bees and butterflies are replaced by flying pollinating robots, where we get our nutrition from bacteria grown in a vat in Scandinavia, where nature is secluded to perfectly pruned upper-class back gardens, a future where we live on fucking mars.
The question we’re asking ourselves, whether humanity can survive in this way, feels wrong, we should be more focused on how we want to live. We–us Westerners, at least–could survive in a synthetic world, but tell me this: would you rather live in a world with long-distance commutes, industrially processed food, digitised relationship, disengagement from the body, or a world where you own a small house made of natural materials, linked to similar dwellings of people you care about deeply, ringed with gardens of nutritious food, surrounded by nature filled that is wildlife?
I recently realised my grieving will have to be a two-step process. I not only need to grieve the quasi-American-dream lifestyle that capitalism promised us, the hopes of comfortably being able to live in a single-family household, consuming, consuming, consuming, and not having to think about my rubbish piling up at the end of the driveway. But I also need to grieve the world that I have never experienced (and might never be able to experience) because of humanity’s unquenchable need to destroy, and take, and consume, and conquer. Grieving is an essential part of the process, once we have grieved we can pick ourselves back up again and create a better future.
I keep hearing this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (once-in-an-eternity opportunity?) to save what previous generations have ruined and bring a life of middle-class luxury for everyone–fully automated luxury communism, eh?–but why can’t we take it a step further, rather than just bring back a life that was comfortable for a select few, can’t we create a better world, a better future, that’s available to everyone?
Reimagining our future
We need alternate imaginings of the world to create a new future for ourselves, and Solarpunk is one of my favourite visions of our future.
A Solarpunk future is a world that emphasises the need for environmental sustainability, social justice, and self-governance. It incorporates collective living and the fulfilment of both nature and humanity in a mutually beneficial relationship. Solarpunk understands that climate change and its associated damages aren’t averted in the future, but incorporates hope because we have the ability to heal them. Through its eco-centric approach, we can create a future where technology is used in a good way, emphasising real-world applications beyond the limitations of capitalism.
As the Solarpunk manifesto says “The “punk” in Solarpunk has to do with rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It has to do with going in a different direction than the conventional one, which is increasingly alarming.” It’s an alternative to the denial or despair we see across the world.
The manifesto goes on to say “At its core, the Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best that humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity world, post-hierarchical and post-capitalist where humanity is seen as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.” and “The solarpunk provides us with a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe a possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, the Solarpunk looks completely into the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.”
In the throes of capitalism, we are made to think that this is the best we can do, that imaginations of different futures are gooey, utopian bullshit that has no place in our no-nonsense, pragmatic world, but as the speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin once said “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” Humans are flexible creatures, we are capable of a whole range of social arrangements. We can create a new world for ourselves, and we can do it on our own.
In the Solarpunk future, humans have managed just in time to stop the destruction of our planet. We have learnt how to use technology to not only improve our living conditions but also the planet. We are no longer supreme chiefs, we are caretakers, gardeners, and stewards of the earth.
I will leave you with this quote by the writer Ashley C. Ford, "The goal of oppressors is to limit your imagination about what is possible without them, so you might never imagine more for yourself and the world you live in. Imagine something better. Get curious about what it actually takes to make it happen. Then fight for it every day."
Inspiration and resources
Climate — A New Story | Charles Eisenstein
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery | Steve Nicholls