Each evening before our meal, my wife and I pause a moment for a little ritual of saying grace and wishing well to all our fellow beings. Something along the lines of:
We’re grateful for this meal and thank all the myriad plants, creatures and human beings who were responsible for providing us with this life-giving food. May they be sustained, just as we are.
What we say varies and is not formulaic: whatever comes into our minds to be grateful for and we wish the same for all our fellow beings. It’s a tiny gesture yet I’ve found it surprisingly powerful in how it helps set a larger and more real context to living.
What can the ordinary person do in the face of cascading global climate breakdown and mass extinctions? We’re drowning in facts and stats about climate chaos, sea level rise, heat waves, rainforest destruction etc. So much so, that many of us have become inured and numb to hearing the endless bad news. It’s an understandable human reaction to something too vast to comprehend.
Modern life increasingly characterises us as separate individuals who should be driven to succeed and to strive to outcompete others, fostering a kind of rampant individualism which mirrors the ethos of late modern capitalism. But that’s not really who we are in my experience. It’s not that we don’t care about our environment even though the prevailing culture dismisses such concerns with its relentless insistence on market forces as the overriding reality in life.
We do care for our families, those around us, our friends, pets, our local parks and woods, so I see the issue as being more about expanding the circle of our care and love. The deeper truth which I’m learning over time is that it is love rather than hope or fear or being in possession of more facts that motivates and brings about change.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, the well known Native American scientist and writer says,
We hear so much of: ‘Well, do you have hope?’ Hope for what? For me it’s about helping people fall in love with the world again. We know as people the power we have when we really recognise our love for someone or something.
Many highly educated people often dismiss efforts at personal change to help environmental issues, pointing out its ‘drop in the bucket’ insignificance. Instead, they explain how meaningful change is all about system change involving governments, COPs, fossil fuel reduction and restraining multinational conglomerates in their depredations of the earth.
But it’s not an either or choice: by including both, to my mind, the potential is much greater. After all, if we aren’t willing to make any changes to our own lifestyle to help others, isn’t it rather hypocritical to demand that the powers that be, should do so?
People point out that we are so totally embedded in this system that you can’t realistically opt out of it unless you were to subsist in a cave. But I’m heartened by seeing how much positive change is possible with a little consistent effort and awareness. For myself, the impetus came a few years ago, when I started to become aware of how the natural world is in precipitous decline, and I let in the dire warnings about rapidly increasing climate chaos. It was then that I realised I needed to do something rather than just feel hopeless or depressed.
On one hand I started to engage in environmental activism, but I also thought, why not see what I can do to live more simply so that other people and creatures can simply live?
Coming from a rich country, my level of consumption is hugely greater than that of people in poor developing countries. And it is rich countries that are largely responsible for the climate chaos and for despoiling so much of the Earth by our global extractivism.
Surely we don’t want to be greedy and take far more than our share when there isn’t enough to go round? Middle class westerners like me are drowning in ‘stuff’, forever being marketed to consume and acquire yet more stuff. I feel grateful for all I’ve received: literally the fruits of the earth in abundance. We would need several planets to provide all people on Earth with the level of material consumption we westerners feel entitled to.
We are not just consumers. So many people, living creatures and plants have laboured to provide us with our sustenance and our luxuries. We are indebted and it is our natural responsibility to reciprocate, to give back. And our giving back starts with an acknowledgement of, and a sense of respect for, what we have received. I’ve found that there’s a quiet joy in not being overburdened with possessions. Once our basic needs are met, there’s a contentedness of not needing more, a sense of ‘enoughness.’
After all, do we really need 2 houses or 2 cars – or even for many of us, any cars at all? If you live in a city, why not ditch the car completely? I use a car sharing club for occasional times when I need a vehicle to drive. Public transport: trains, buses, plus cycling and walking, of is the direction to head in. And if you live rurally, then it would be better to get smaller, less polluting cars or EVs – not SUV gas guzzling tanks.
Rather surprisingly, I learned that one of the very most important actions you can take to reduce harm to our precious living world, is to take charge of your pension and invest it in funds and companies who are creating a positive impact rather than letting it be unwittingly invested in destructive industries.
I decided to stop flying for holidays. Isn’t it only fair to really cut down on flying since it is so incredibly polluting? You could decide to stop flying for vacations, or to fly less – say only once a year and to go for longer periods. After all, to put it in perspective, most of the world has never even been in a plane.
Once I started looking more closely at my lifestyle, I discovered more and more aspects which if possible, I wanted to change. I’ve found it to be a life positive experience with no sense of austerity or deprivation. I sometimes feel like I’m unplugging from the Matrix. Of course what I’m saying is mostly relevant to other middle class folk like me; if you’re struggling to put food on the table and to heat your home and having to resort to foodbanks, then much of what I’m talking about would be luxuries that understandably you can ill afford.
I was already vegetarian and so I decided to become vegan, after realising how the dairy industry is both cruel and inseparable from the meat industry. I’m not suggesting everyone should do this, but if we all seriously cut down our meat consumption, (as advised by science anyway) it would have an enormously positive effect in reducing emissions, freeing up so much land for nature recovery, reducing rainforest destruction caused by growing crops for livestock feed, and incidentally we’d be healthier.
And the other important aspect is to buy free range meat, thus removing support for industrial factory farming which degrades and abuses our fellow animals. This is interspecies justice.
Another important change which I previously hadn’t realised the implications of, was to shift my diet to eating organic food as much as possible. Organic farming doesn’t poison the land with pesticides and herbicides, and so helps our struggling pollinators and other declining wildlife and also helps the land regenerate; it supports small organic farmers trying to farm regeneratively in the midst of the industrial agro machine. I know that organic food is more expensive (bizarrely so, in spite of it being more simple) but whatever we can do within our means in that direction, can only be beneficial.
I am helped practically by ethical consumption organisations like Ethical Consumer magazine and websites which do all the research on every product imaginable, analysing the supply chains and the ethics of every step in production, making it easy for you to make informed choices. I’m sure similar bodies exist in various countries.
At first glance, trying to better align your lifestyle with what is needed for nature and people everywhere to thrive, might appear almost impossible in our market economies, whose repeated mantra is growth, growth, growth. In the past we were naturally much more connected to the provenance of what we bought or bartered when we lived in a village economy. But now, the ripple effects of our choices spread out over the entire globe, making any kind of responsibility and kinship very hard to track.
Yet with the help of many smaller ethical companies, organisations and apps springing up who are aware of all these issues, we can reconnect with the real effects for good as well as for ill, of our choices – and become citizens rather than consumers. An ethical dimension still exists and re-emerges in plain sight as soon as you rightly view your purchases as not just stuff, objects, commodities. We’re talking about our wider kin, whether humans, non human animals, forests, rivers and oceans. It’s what Robin Wall Kimmerer refers to as practical reverence.
And there is nothing like growing vegetables at home to emotionally reconnect us with the natural cycles. Even if it’s just a window box with herbs or tomatoes, we can be part of the gift economy and feel gratitude to Mother Earth.
These are just a few examples of the many changes that I have made to my lifestyle. I feel richer and with a sense that I’m giving back to Mother Earth and realising that living is not a transactional affair.
At the moment, others may think you’re an outlier and maybe a bit extreme, but this could become a popular cultural change. Amitav Ghosh, the renowned Indian writer, has suggested that such actions could help effect an international cultural change, since the burgeoning middle classes in developing countries aspire to having lifestyles like those in the West.
Without being at all evangelical, conversations naturally tend to come up with friends and acquaintances, and people are often interested to learn about all this; and they can feel that they are recovering a greater agency, rather than the common feeling of disempowerment that you can’t really change anything.
We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
