TCN Newsletter Issue 19: November 2015
Relations Guild Article:
Climate Crisis: A (Perma)Cultural Deconditioning
by Taylor Proffitt
The “Climate Crisis” we face is a drag. It is now more than ever apparent that the permaculture/ regenerative agriculture/ carbon farming community has the more efficient solutions to sequestering carbon and reversing the negative symptoms of climate change. It also appears that these ecological agriculture-based solutions may or may not take place at proper scale soon enough. What I’ve personally discovered in researching this topic is the shadow of climate solution culture: being the lack of skills and practice needed to overcome old world conditioning. Fear-based scarcity has been the strongest opponent to “the turning of the tide” towards widespread demand of climate-conscious culture, from my seat in the house, and it continually pins people of the same worldview against each other on issues such as sources of harmful emissions or energy politics. But this lack of coherence needed for a climate revolution is only one of very many symptoms caused by a culture of fear. I’ve seen scarcity and fear disrupt the progress in regenerative businesses, intentional communities, and in the midst of on the ground action and civil disobedience.
As many of us already know, once we collectively break these barriers of fear and scarcity, we can interface with the rest of the world with more efficacy, moving regenerative solutions closer to their tipping point to the masses. In breaking these barriers, philosophical hermeneutics can be a helpful guide.
Our contexts determine our outcomes. If our context is authentically ours, our outcomes will so be. Just as inter-subjectivity has a role in philosophy, it has a place in climate change dialogue, within which I’ve seen little. The main problem and potential solution within this dialogue is accessibility: People who are just trying to survive don’t have time to take to the streets spend their time and resources on volunteerism or community service. If the largest problem we face as a community is the inaccessible nature of our work, how is some complex philosophical approach to what we already do anything but decrease accessibility? The nature of hermeneutics can begin to explain. “Concepts such as; inter-subjectivity, Being, authenticity, fore-structure, pre-suppositions, prejudice, temporality and history all help to enhance health and social science researchers’ understanding of his [Gadamer’s] theory [of philosophical hermeneutics] and its application.” If accessibility is the problem, a new approach to language, rhetoric, and the rebranding of climate crisis (the fear of which often results in escapist reactions rendering many apathetic) might be a solution.
That hermeneutics can offer more accessibility in climate dialogue and regenerative solutions is an idea which sparked my interest after I took a survey I took earlier this year, sent out by the International Permaculture Convergence. The survey was a great step in the right direction in the global discussion in determining priorities to establish as the permaculture movement and active climate conservation grows. As I took the survey, I felt that by providing an area for people to describe their projects, there was an element of allowing contextual opinions to reveal themselves. For example, for someone involved in culturally appropriate farming, accessibility to permaculture educational resources may be “most important”, more so than number of permaculture convergences held.
This acknowledgement of inter-subjectivity in the health of organizing a growing movement is a practice that itself is slowly and necessarily expanding. What I’ve noticed in discussions throughout the internet and in the 3D realm is that the largest disagreements between people who have generally the same views on solving earth’s most pressing issues has loads to do with context. This outer zone of permaculture which connects us to the rest of the population, where we interface with the general public through day to day interactions and even between ourselves and other humans is the buffer zone between our familiar system and the external. It is the cultivated wild zone in a cultivated ecological system. In my search for learning more efficient tactics in developing my personal ability to interface with more accessible language and overall efficiency, I’ve turned to a Gaia University Bachelor’s Program. This program is educating 20 earth actionists at a time who are spreading the tools they’ve gained in the program to their own circle of friends and family.
Gaia University has taught me that in caring for myself, others, and the planet, it’s important to do what I’ll call a perspective review first, before going to do the on-the-ground work. We talk about the metaphor of the inner landscape in permaculture, and before interacting with the inner landscape, we must first observe it thoroughly, as we must in designing any ecological landscape. This process of observing our conditioning, intersubjectivity, and behavior patterning thoroughly is what I call perspective review. It’s essentially a hermeneutical breakdown of foundational elements which Jungian practitioners call “individuation”. Some would say that these observations of our own biases, prejudices, and histories from a non-biased, truthful, and honest viewpoint is the most important work there is to do in this lifetime. It’s compassionate self observation, and an essential aspect of inner landscape work. Perspective review is observing one’s own prejudices before interacting with them and making effort to decondition these prejudices and thought and behavior patterning.
Not necessarily do all patterns of our inter-subjectivities and histories need deconditioning, which is why it is so valuable to first observe them all and sit with them before interacting with these symptoms of our cultural conditioning. For starters, observing our subtle actions throughout the day, even down to how we look at people when walking down the street, where we sit in a cafe, which plants we love most, and why what makes us happy makes us so, is where this outer zone between the public and ourselves exists. Our daily patterns speak volumes to our conditioning, and after noticing these patterns, we can begin to do the inner work to transform ourselves into healthier, more efficient evangelists of effective climate restoration. The problem this solves and takes into account is that some overzealous practitioners jump into restoring the inner landscape without first observing and identifying what needs tending, causing more interpersonal waste than yield.
Perspective review is also an adaptation of Gaia University’s career and life review. Before beginning a project at Gaia University, students take a look back at where they’ve been, what has happened, and why. Then they work on deconditioning some of the harmful symptoms of cultural programming they’ve endured. So perhaps, in self administering a perspective review in daily practice, climate restorers can come closer to the basics of where they need to go and how. A perspective review is when we follow our subconscious belief systems to their roots, and identify whether they are authentically ours, or whether they are a product of our cultural conditioning. Only after embarking on this personal journey can we speak clearly and authentically. Only in speaking clearly and authentically, can we have constructive dialogue and action in spreading the skillsets to climate restoration to more of the public. Since it’s estimated we only need between 1% and 12% of the global population to have a globally effective resistance, the heightened accessibility doesn’t have to engage everyone. It doesn’t even have to engage most people, or even one quarter of people. We can automate the growth of climate restoration through simply being accessible to, for example, everyone who recycles globally.
Hans-Georg Gadamer says that “One must bear in mind the way that our language can presage our philosophizing, insofar as one seeks to make clear the implication of the words used by philosophy”. In our discussions of climate change and restoration, for example, it is important to understand the context of our language and belief systems, whether they are authentically ours or conditioned, where we are in the process of learning and teaching them, and where it’s all moving on an interpersonal and collective scale. Some say that our climate is a reflection of our collective unconscious and scarcity and colonization has effectively dominated much of our collective dialogue in reference to eco-activism, as well as conversations among anti-war protesters, civil rights disobedients, and the conservationists like Edward Abbey and Henry Thoreau. The future of our species has everything to do with decolonizing ourselves, once we achieve this, our climate will quickly follow. We have all the techniques and strategies to restore our ecosystems and they are easy to put into practice, but until we do take the work of collective individuation into the climate conversations and climate actions, we will continue to hit massive barriers in our restoration work.
The good news is that I think we’re on the brink of figuring out how to empower and encourage this global dialogue. Through the local food movement, ecological restoration, climate politics, eco-business, eco-tourism and (increasingly) permaculture, we’re becoming slowly more conscientious in our consumerism. The next pragmatic step is the trending of collective transformation toward a more compassionate culture whose conditioning is positive. It must start with the ecological community and ripple outward. Sometimes our excitement to move forward obscures our ability to be patient, which in itself perpetuates scarcity. I’ve found that in this gargantuan task of transforming climate perspectives into interpersonal perspectives, Ethan Hughes and the Possibility Alliance are true north. These role models are utilizing hermeneutics in combating patriarchy and climate change by cheering on small victories, small transformations that happen everyday, and, you guessed it, doing the inner work as an integral spect to climate restoration.
In hermeneutics, cultural conditioning is not directly described, so far as I can tell. It’s implied, however, through the study of history and prejudice. Had Gadamer and Heidegger been revolutionaries, or even ecological conservationists, I suspect they’d have some points to make about why permaculture is not at its tipping point, and why it isn’t accessible to the masses. Permanent Culture, they might say, makes the assumption that a species can maintain relative permanence. If resilience is a “measure of how much disturbance an ecosystem [or species in our case] can handle without shifting into a qualitatively different state“ then who is to say our species is resilient, without the context of our species history? Perhaps hermeneutics says that the history of our species has informed us that we will remain at the top of the food chain, or evolve higher up on it, but that we have unintentionally designed a species disturbance which is beyond our ability to handle without shifting into a qualitatively different state? Just the opposite, we might say that we’re equipped to be resilient in the disturbance of imminent climate change because of the very fact that we are moving toward a shift in cultural and ecological restoration.
No matter the outcome, the present moment requires more compassion, more active listening, and more self observation whether or not we are to handle the disturbance of climate change or prevent our nearly “successful species” from shifting into extinction. There is hope in the work we do, and if we are able to come together in dialogue with more awareness of our own contextual subjectivity, less can be said and more can be done. If the clock is ticking down, the closer we move toward restoration, the farther away from interpersonal and collective climate crisis. It’s important to remember that each day, we evolve into a more resilient species, more able to transform from the inside out.
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by Taylor Proffitt
TCN Community Member
Network Ambassador at NuMundo