06/09/2023
PROPOSITION 1: WE LIVE IN A DISASTROUS WORLD, WITH DISASTER BUILT INTO HOW WE CURRENTLY DWELL ON THE EARTH.
We are the disaster. Despite the beauty of the earth... despite the intelligence and ingenuity of humans... we have built in high risk disaster prone places, we have created fractured social domains, we pollute our air, water, soil and ecosystems...
The earth just moves as it does... and so often we get in the way of intensity, and out of the way of care...
Inviting your responses + on-the-ground stories...
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PROPOSITION 1
We live in a disastrous world, with disasters built into how we currently dwell on earth.
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We live upon a dynamic beautiful earth, within an intricate, complex and disastrous human world, where disaster is built into our ill-placed, polluting, exploitative, and collectively-fractured ways of being human together.
The great achievements of human individuals and whole societies are mixed up with many disastrous approaches which have consequences for humans and the ecosystems we interact with on earth. Disasters don’t just happen because of the imposition of unwelcome and unpredicted threats from the outside. The systems we have created and live within as post-industrial humans makes disasters more likely, and more calamitous.
Ill-placed: We build homes and infrastructures in places of great fertility and beauty upon the earth, but such places are usually zones of great intensities of earthly processes: flood plains, river systems, hillsides, ocean shores, estuaries, the edge of what forests remain after our clearing of them, earthquake fault lines and volcanic ridges. Humans, and many plants and animals, have always lived in such zones. But whilst animals and nomadic humans can move quickly, when the earth rumbles, the built environment of modern humans remains stuck in the path of whatever is coming its way. Such ill-placement has been the trend of the long arc of human history beginning with the gradual emergence of the city state and mono agriculture in fertile crescents across the globe several millennia ago, and increasingly so as the world’s population bulges and continues to migrate towards the sedentary lifestyles and mass gatherings of urban centres. And it’s not just the built infrastructure of our homes and workplaces at stake, it’s also our water, transportation, electrical and digital infrastructures that have been located in harm’s way. We continue to build where intense natural events are more likely, and when disasters strike, it strikes hard.
Polluting: Over human history, we have increasingly dug up and released into our air and into our soil materials that lay dormant in the earth for eons, or more recently synthesised and circulated new molecules and materials never experienced before on our planet. In doing so, we are changing the dynamic equilibriums of our air, waters and ecosystems. We have loaded up our earth’s systems so its processes have become more volatile, where long-term baselines of energetic flows and equilibriums are, in terms of geological time, quickly shifting, potentially teething on tipping points, and intense natural events are more likely.
Exploitative erosion of living agency: The modern city state, in its democratic aspirations, seeks to offer freedom to its citizens within a thriving economy and culture. But like the first democratic experiments of ancient Greece, where only some were allowed into the privileged democratic circle (basically, you had to be rich, male, local) and many sat at the margins, or worse, lived in enslaved or dispossessed states, such is the global socio-economic legacy of modern colonialism and multinational capitalism. The inner living agency of human individuals and communities, of other animal and plant organisms, and of earth’s water, air and soil systems, is exploited when the source of living is treated as a resource for surplus-driven exchange or as something to command and control, for the sake of the security of us (however defined) over them (the others). For those who have been exploited and dispossessed, the (cultural, systemic, socio-economic) disaster has already happened, and when natural disasters strike, such people are repeatedly disproportionately affected.
Collectively-fractured: More than ever in global history, more of us are living together in urban centres, more of us move from town to town, and city to city, regularly, so we are living in a great experiment of strangers cooperating together, or at least getting on with their lives whilst in close quarters. Furthermore, the spare time of the middle and working classes is no longer, cost of living has shot through the roof, people are working longer hours overall, work-life balance has lost its balance, social media and accelerated news cycles spurn antagonist interactions rather than open dialogue, the gap between rich and poor grows, and the expanded operations of government are as discoordinated as they are complex. This has occurred across the globe but also very much so in Australia. We are a collectively-fractured society, despite many technologies and channels of communication, and despite many people donning the appearance, culturally, of the dwindling (economically-eviscerated) middle class.
None of these matters are easily addressed, such are the long-term interwoven rootedness of these issues in how we live together. Any genuine changes to improve how we dwell collectively on the earth, how we care deeply for each other, and how we approach disasters, will be difficult and complex to achieve.
