The Urgency of Urban/Suburban Ecoliteracy
By Wendy Talaro, Sustainability Integration Specialist and Principal Ecological Landscape Designer & Consultant behind ‘Fruits to Nuts’.

There are many names for the Transition we collectively find ourselves in: The Great Turning, The Great Unraveling, World’s End, 2012, etc. The nomenclature is not as important as recognizing that we are in the midst of a transition and as such, none can afford to sit passively by, switch on the TV, and doze untroubled into what lies ahead. This stage in our evolution as a species conspires to shake us out of personal and collective complacency by any means necessary. In the macroscopic ‘big picture’, as it is with the fractal smaller scale of our individual lives, the story we tell ourselves to imbue experience with meaning will be distilled into clarity through hindsight’s perspective. What will be learned and gained as the newborns and toddlers of today look back as adults at the choices their forebears made? Will they feel - pride, pity, or shame?

Why was a shakedown necessary, even inevitable? Change, no matter how appealing, is never initiated out of warm and fuzzy armchair comfort. Like the foreign irritant that induces an oyster to surround the offending material with nacre to create what humans value as pearls, every challenge bears gifts that can be discovered no other way than to traverse through or endure the experience (what Joseph Campbell referred to as the “hero’s journey”). Our brains have evolved to maximize opportunities for survival, which is correlated with the attachment to safety. Change is not perceived as safe and we are a peculiar species. As Carolyn Myss said, “We’re afraid to live, we’re afraid to die, and we’re afraid of everything in between.” Although there is widespread intellectual knowledge of a need to achieve environmental sensitivity and ecological rapport, substantive and fundamental change will not occur until we emotionally want the changes more than we logically and intellectually tell ourselves that we need them.

Wants precede needs both sequentially and in magnitude of power over the human decision making process because wants are emotional in origin, whereas needs are rooted in cognitive rationalization. The emotional part of our brains – the limbic brain – appeared with the first mammals about 180 million years ago. It was only 1.8 million years ago that the earliest species of the Homo genus, Homo habilis, emerged and it’s been about 195,000 years since the first Homo sapiens walked the earth in Africa. Do the math – the limbic brain is 100 times older than the earliest ancestor of modern humans and 923 times older than Homo sapiens itself. The pompous claim that reason reigns supreme is itself a rationalization to reinforce a self-inflated sense of human importance and superiority.

As much as we pride ourselves on the reasoning abilities, manipulative power, and accomplishments made possible by the neocortex, the limbic brain has the power to hijack and override neocortex functions when necessary. This override happens in situations where the perception of danger requires instantaneous appropriate action faster than the speed of thought, moments when taking the time to assess the bigger picture of a situation may well result in death. Although the limbic brain can be an ally, it also hampers our ability to respond appropriately to threats. The modern urban-dwelling human perception of the passage of time is myopically out of step and asnynchronous from the timescales of nature and the planet. The limbic brain responds to sudden changes in the environment but the subtleties of threats embedded in slow changes are lost on a mind that cannot perceive them, while the rational function of the neocortex is misused by some to construct comforting, though false, stories – such as “the current spike in atmospheric CO2 is part of natural geological cycles of variation”, “global warming is nature’s fault”, and “God will fix the environmental mess we have created”. Loss of the ozone layer, global warming, topsoil erosion, and oceanic acidification are examples of massive, species-threatening changes that happen almost imperceptibly over the course of long periods of time until the consequences of those anthropogenic changes gain enough momentum to manifest with dramatic speed and violence.

The limbic brain moderates the relationships between emotion, memory and learning. It is also Responsible for self-protective fight-or-flight responses, translating short-term experiences into emotionally laden long-term memories. First impressions captured by the limbic brain are notoriously difficult to dislodge and overwrite, even when those impressions are not supported by facts and experiences gathered over time.

For every child who is born and raised in a city who comes to know no other contexts for experiencing the world unmediated by steel, asphalt, and concrete, you will almost invariably have an adult emotionally alienated from nature and divorced from visceral knowledge of its patterns and rhythms. Alienated children grow into alienated adults who reproduce exactly what they know, and perhaps more tragically, reproduce by default what they don’t know that they don’t know.

A school curriculum may teach watershed form and function and yet a child may never see or experience a river flowing unfettered. The idea of a watershed will remain an abstraction devoid of emotional attachment or meaning. A school garden may demonstrate how food plants grow without successfully conveying that healthy plants depend upon healthy soil, which operates integrally as a complex system, or without disclosing the wasteful tragedy of immense topsoil losses annually from domestic U.S. and international crop growing areas.

What adults don’t know that they don’t know can and does hurt them; in turn, adult ignorance impedes the breadth of ecological awareness and knowledge of children whom the adults parent, mentor, and teach. All become stymied in the effort to strive for sustainability because no one understands the impacts of their individual, let alone collective choices. Responsibility becomes diffuse and murky. It is easy (but not right) to make disempowering excuses to do nothing when one rationalizes that a single person’s actions are insignificant.

In 2008, an important threshold was crossed: half of all humans now live in urban areas—and 70 percent will by 2050—even though cities occupy only about 3 percent of Earth's land surface. For relative comparison, the historically wealthy nations in Europe and North America are more than 70 percent urbanized. In 2007, 81.4 percent of the US population lived in urban areas and the trend of concentration of the global population into cities is expected to continue unabated through this century. The odds that a child will grow up in an urban or suburban environment among environmentally disconnected adults are increasing at a time when emotional reconnection to nature and a visceral sense of relationship to place are needed more than ever.

Ecoliteracy and Sustainability
Just why is it necessary to become literate in nature’s language of patterns, cycles, and rhythms? For all the hype, greenwashing, and interest in sustainability at this point in history, authentic sustainability entails attunement with earth’s systems and cycles – the sources of our collective survival, well-being, and wealth as a species. Humans appropriate all of the material means of their sustenance and economic activity from the planet. Ecology trumps economy – it always has and always will, although the functions of the latter has wrought substantial damage to the former. Pursuit of sustainability is a sham and mere window dressing on predatory human activity so long as we remain disconnected from the earth that we fundamentally depend upon.

The basis of our economic growth and activity is consumption driven. The faster raw materials are extracted and transformed through manufacturing processes, used up, and then discarded, the greater the resulting economic growth. The objective of modern economics has been to maximize both the diversity and sheer volume of resource consumption in order to achieve the fastest, largest leaps in sustained economic activity. Growth at any cost is what global economics rewards and requires to function. With the respect to impacts on the rest of the planet, human conduct has been selfish at best, psychopathic at worst.

We are only one of 1.9 million species, yet we appropriate up to 83% of the global terrestrial land mass (Sanderson et alia, 2002) while Hannah et al., estimated that about 36% of the Earth’s land masses not covered by ice or barren desert is “entirely dominated by man”. Regardless of the parameters of any given study to quantify the human impact upon the planet, it is clear that our influence is profound and our ecological footprint is huge. Lest this humbling, pointed fact escape attention, humans need the rest of the biosphere’s inhabitants to survive but the converse is not true. For each disruption of functioning ecosystem “services” and thread unraveled from the web of life, people will need to divert even more attention, money, and energy to remediation and direct management of ecological systems that were once self-regulating and “free”. Environmental damage is ultimately very expensive, especially when the cumulative costs were initially externalized.

Above all else, sustainability is a process rather than a fixed end result. The lowest hanging fruit is being picked right now with strides being made in energy conservation, renewable energy generation, and energy efficiency. Industrialized and urbanized human societies require harnessed forms of refined/processed energy (i.e. electricity, fractionated and concentrated hydrocarbons, natural gas) to sustain the frenetic activity and maintain business-as-usual as best as possible. But hard, soul-searching questions make the next inevitable steps in the direction of sustainability not only politically prickly, even unpalatable, but disturbing and threatening. Who will broach the subject of unconstrained population growth, challenge the socially accepted entitlement of over consumption of wealthier classes of people all over the globe, or reconsider a non-regenerative global economic model based upon shuttling material from cradle to grave as fast as possible? What happens when half of the world’s oil has been extracted, if that tipping point has not already been reached? Who will decide the priorities and equitable distribution of freshwater supplies, particularly in arid climates, as global warming shifts patterns of precipitation and snowpack?

The hardest work of reshaping society for creating authentic sustainability economically, ecologically, and socially will come of facing our own demons, defenseless yet resource-full in our compassion and armed with the self-knowledge of how our own minds work at cross purposes with our highest and best good. In fact, sustainability will be elusive if not impossible unless this is done. While nature’s conditions for survival can be merciless, the anthropogenic mandate to subjugate and dominate nature has resulted in mastery in some ways but ultimately blatant, self-destructive exploitation in others. It is old news that the ecological services upon which we depend upon are being damaged by human activity. The news that has not settled in yet with widespread visceral acceptance is that we are responsible for addressing the mess we have created and that change will require reprioritization of what we value.

Too much privilege, too much comfort, not enough reality. Privilege breeds attitudes of entitlement and an attitude of entitlement is the opposite of humble gratitude. Entitlement is implicitly granted through privilege and easier to impose collectively when there are divisive social, religious, and political constructs that designate one group of people (or species) "superior" to all others. For those who consider themselves adherents to the Law of Attraction and fans of “The Secret”, it is not enough to provide value solely for fellow humans; the offering of value must be extended to the rest of the family in the web of life on this planet. Nefarious perceptual constructs support exploitative relationships that undermine not just the survival of the human species, but the survival of tens to hundreds of thousands of kindred species. The sixth wave of extinction is already in progress and a single species is responsible for knocking the dominoes into motion. The collective psychological legacy and karmic burden of ten thousand years of exploitation are manifesting fractally and simultaneously on the micro (interpersonal) and macro (domestic and international policy) scales. As the aphorism goes, if you don’t change course, you might end up where you’re headed.

Wendy Talaro on Blend Radio
Wendy was a featured guest on Garden Gossip home and garden radio on October 10, 2009. To meet the rest of the guests and listen to the entire show, please click here. To listen to her interview, please double click on the play button below.