Roof of the Sustainable
For most of humankind's history, the resource base that consisted of the land, sea, energy, minerals, and capacity to absorb pollution, had been like a high roof of ever yet more potential above their head. Civilizations could grow upwards towards it, limited in their endurance by the quality and resistance of their organization, and by the accumulated artifice with which nature was bid to render her sustenance. That roof is by definition, the limit to what can be sustained upon the face of the planet, in terms of population and ongoing exhaustion of resources; it is the measure of what can be built without collapsing due to insufficient support, even if it is unclear where that exact level may be.
Less than three centuries ago, humankind suddenly found itself on top of the roof. The dead matter left over from the photosynthetic process had collected over hundreds of millions of years, and become coal, natural gas, and oil. Those creatures who had always felt the heaviness of the roof above them, now found these accumulated energies at their beck and call, and suddenly the sky seemed to be the limit, infinitely above. They danced with exhuberance and eventually came to believe in the boundlessness of their own cleverness, building higher and higher above the now forgotten roof.
The use of money became evermore widespread, and those who had more of it by one manner or another were in the best position to acquire yet more, and by creating private ownership of social means, then banks, corporations, and other advantages through political influence, they conspired and so did. The rich could become richer because of the accumulated energies that could now be harnessed with the labor of others, and the poor were poor so that the rich could be rich. From magnificent to iniquitous were the creations engendered by this aggregation of ability to command work and resources, as capital, thusly enabled by the universality of dependence.
The facility of money to exponentially grow with compounding interest intoxicated, and debtors were everywhere sought, so that Jack would owe Jill more tomorrow than today, even though Jill was just sitting back. That this increasing debt might continue to exist without losing purchasing power due to too much money chasing not enough goods, the vortex of the global economy had to also ever increase, in velocity, in size, and in what it consumed of the earth's resources. The design of civilization came to be largely determined by exchanging for the necessities of life, money. This was the master of humankind, the essential judge of what was ultimately right, for they no longer knew how to survive without it -- mattering not how it was acquired, only that it be possessed, the evils thus engendered were myriad.
The edifice of industrial civilization, and its corresponding explosion of population, was born with a unique opportunity of growth, and with time it hardened its social structure into one where that exponential growth became indispensable: an edifice that could only expand upwards toward infinity, all built above the roof of the sustainable. For these accumulated energies that became even the very base of food production, while not exhaustible in their totality, would gradually then precipitously decrease in availability, as the effort of their extraction augmented against an ever diminishing resource; the global incapacity to absorb the mounting pollution from the combustion of these energies, eventually began to evoke a berserk climate change, and threatened species everywhere with rapidity of change.
Of all the possible transportation designs, the one that they believed to so cherish, the ubiquitous private automobile, nothing was more difficult to maintain on an enduring basis, requiring extravagant resources for fabrication and use, as well as complete replacement every score of years. But it was never intended to be systematically intelligent, only to be the most lucrative to the owners of enterprise. This flaw ran through too much of humankind's creations —comprehensible during ascent toward greater riches, but incompatible with imperative to make more out of an economy that had to become much less.
There is no Way onward other than to come down beneath the roof, bringing with us the cumulative knowledge and works that this luxuriousness of capital has inspired, our tools. Anything else is destined to collapse. Mistakes would be: to give too much credit to our cleverness and not enough to the potential that derived from storage of eons of sunlight; to further an economic system that depends upon growth, believing from habit it to be the only possibility; to imagine that the new world below the roof shall be largely unchanged from this world above, simply because we have put such effort into the existing; to conceive that the occupation of humankind should ever be the development of tools, and never the evolution of social relation.
Great Change, if it threatens to leave our hearts with dry sand, will be resisted, for we are creatures of dreams and go willingly only towards joy and more abundant light. Our nature is not iron bound to be reflection of an economic world fashioned by profit seeking and money lending; we have not always dreamed only of what can be purchased, or hoarded without surfeit; not always had to be each for their own against all else, huddled back into that last refuge, the fertile nuclear family. We can know joy and better endure shared hardships in belonging within human community, in nearness to the natural world; we can seek the nature of the Divine within our Self by knowing the Divine as the Entirety.
--Morningthunder