...just might have to pick up her new book...
"Life has encoded in every other-than-human species a sort of protocol or blueprint of economic rules for survival, a set of behaviors and relationships that allow Life as we know it to live within earth's means, to be long-term sustainable. In the physical/material realm on this planet, Life calls the shots. Life rules, we don't. Other species have no choice but to obey those economic rules. We alone have a choice. And lately, as a species living under the influence of a global economy that has, in the vernacular, gone viral, we've chosen pridefully and foolishly to break all the rules. The way we live in the present Global Economic Order - capital G, capital E, capital O - isn't sustainable. It's pathological. It works at cross-purposes to everything small g, e and o – "geo," everything earthy. In particular, the GEO works at cross-purposes to Life."
"If you condense the 100,000 years or so that Homo sapiens sapiens, humans like us, have been around into the 24 hours of one day, the Global Economic Order has been in existence for less than a minute. We can live without a GEO, but we can't live without or apart from Life as we know it. So we have two choices: We can forego our present economic model and choose to learn and obey Life's economic rules. Or we can choose not to. In which case, Life will rule us out, adapt to our trespasses like an apple tree adapting to a lightening strike, and get on with its experiment in creating and sustaining more life just fine without us. Life rules, we don't."
"There's actually a pretty good explanation for the now almost-total disconnect between our perception of reality and our actual reality, between our sense as a species of being larger than Life and the inarguable fact that we are dependent on it for our very existence. Actually, there are a couple of explanations.
One is money. Since we use money - or its funny-money kin, such as credit and its ever-funnier-money kin like default swaps - to acquire the things we need and want, we don't provide those things for ourselves; we've lost track of where the things we need and want actually come from. We have little or no knowledge of the sources of our provisions or the damage done to living systems by the way we acquire them and the amounts of them we acquire. We've put our faith in the economy's ability to deliver what we need to us, so long as we have enough money. Money has come between us and substantial things - the real goods, resources and ecosystem services that we actually need to live.
Money has kept us from seeing the truth of our circumstances, which is that soon there will be insufficient fossil fuels, plastics, clean fresh water, forests, living soil, grains, seafood, congenial and predictable climate, functioning governments. You name it, we'll run short of it ad infinitum.
Another explanation for our ignorance of the reality of our present circumstances is that most people have never heard of or taken seriously the limiting factor on a finite planet called "carrying capacity" - the number of a species or a collection of species that an ecosystem can support long-term without suffering damage in excess of what the ecosystem itself can repair. In accounting, exceeding carrying capacity is called going bankrupt. That's where we're headed environmentally, as well as financially, right now. But most of us don't realize that's where we are yet, because in those previous 23 hours and 59 minutes of human history, we've either had more places - more "New Worlds" to move to, conquer and plunder - or new technologies that would do a better job of plundering the places we were in to provide for us.
We have just recently - in, say, the last 30 seconds of that last most recent minute of human history - hit that point in our global economic assault on living things and living systems both human and natural, that there's no going back. We have just hit what I call Critical Mass, which is the name I've given what others are calling collapse, the tipping point, the long emergency, or bottleneck. It's my name for our previously latent and slowly unfolding, now rapidly worsening planetary equivalent of HIV/AIDS."
Listening to Life, Before It's Too Late: An Interview With Ellen LaConte | Truthout
