Life Inside a Mirage

I haven’t written in this blog for ages, and I thought a short explanation was called for. 

So why haven’t I been writing anything?

Basically, as the pandemic isolation kicked in, I just stopped. I lost any energy I had to try and be creative. Despair about the climate crisis had been growing on me and it was easy to get depressed and feel like there wasn’t much hope of humanity actually doing anything about it. There were so many reasons to give up…Trump was President… The hardest thing was the fact that so many people supported and that he was the tip of the iceberg. This reality is ongoing, of course. I guess I just lost my hope. Then the pandemic came and all that has entailed. I am in awe of the many people who have held onto hope, or at least gutted it out and kept writing and working and hoping for change and for justice. I haven’t shut down, I have kept up my donation garden and growing vegetables to donate to food pantries. Our non-profit, Earth’s Table, has grown and developed in many wonderful ways. It is a good team of people and a source of inspiration for me. Working outside and digging in the dirt continues to renew me and keeps me going. I have kept voting and working for progressive candidates. I have kept working on environmental work locally, active in our local church Earth Action Team and the Boulder Greenfaith International Circle. Taking action has helped. 

But the fact remains, I just quit writing. Lately, I have missed it. As I think I have shared in the past, writing articles and sermons in my career was a benefit to me, primarily. I hope others got something out of it, but it was a gift to me; clarifying my thoughts, forcing me to do research and come up with new ideas. Forcing me to learn something. By shutting down I lost this enriching part of my life. So here I am, it’s time to try again. 

If one allows oneself to be negative, all the problems that existed when I quit writing in 2016 are still around and are mostly worse. The pandemic has taken it’s deadly toll. The divisions in the country and huge support for the racism and reactionary ideas of the “Trumpies” (as my neighbor calls them) is still around. The climate crisis worsens and Glascow was pretty disappointing. Climate events wreck havoc on communities around the world. The summer air quality in Colorado from the fires has become much worse. Wildfire swept through suburban Boulder recently with enormous loss. However, there is much to celebrate and I am encouraged by many things that are happening with the environmental movement. But regardless of how I am feeling, or what progress has been made or not made, despite who happens to be on the Supreme Court or in US government, I need to rejoin hopeful action. I have to make myself write something, if only to get my brain going. But really because it symbolizes hope for me. It is a sign of faith. Faith that the Spirit of the Universe, the Process of Creation usually named “God” is still evolving and creating and is present in me and all things. I need to kindle this faith within me and seek hope. 

Life inside a mirage – visiting Palm Desert

There have been many science fiction depictions of humanity living under domes. Logan’s Run, a movie from 1977, is set in the future and depicts a human society that has destroyed its climate and is forced to live under a protective dome in order to survive. I also remember the Biosphere experiment in 1991 where eight people tried to survive in a self sufficient biosphere for 2 years. Or the Eden Project that Laura and I visited in Cornwall that uses domes to create huge greenhouses in an abandoned quarry that support plant and animal life. The vision of humanity reduced to living under domes on a planet Earth where the environment is no longer conducive to human life definitely figures in my imagination. On my recent visit to Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage and the other towns in the Coachella Valley in California I was struck by the fact that people there are already living under a kind of dome.

Driving into Palm Springs, after camping in Joshua Tree National Park, we drove through a bleak, desert environment where only plants and animals that have adapted to the harsh conditions still thrive. But driving into the Coachella Valley one arrives into a seemingly lush place with palm trees and bright green grass. Golf courses thrive next to housing units (mostly surrounded by walls) with bright flowers and healthy gardens. A growing community, it supports a huge number of people and their pets and gardens. It’s like you dropped a verdant, tropical city into the middle of the California desert. There is one big difference however, tropical cities have water, but in the Coachella Valley almost all the water comes from somewhere else, much of it from the Colorado River. One of the cities there, Rancho Mirage, where we had dinner one evening, seems perfectly named; a mirage, a non-existent vision of water or oasis in the desert. It struck me that the whole thing is a mirage, an artificial city with little or no relationship to its environment. The thousands of people who live and visit there can remain oblivious to the fact that there is a desert world outside their little oasis. Stepping two feet out of the irrigated zone and you are back in arid sand and rock. It occurred to me that they might as well be living under a dome, in fact a dome might help the valley infrastructure by allowing them to recycle air and water and be less wasteful of resources. 

Humans in the Coachella Valley seem to living, shopping, playing golf, watching TV, eating out, building houses and going about their business completely separated from the Earth’s natural environment around them. Though starkly obvious in the Coachella Valley, it came to me that much of humanity, particularly in cities and suburbs, go about their lives in very similar ways. Is my life so different? Even if the city is located in a less arid environment, many of the inhabitants have little or no connection to the surrounding environment. Unless someone is a gardener, hiker or other outside enthusiast, it’s easy to live out your life as if one was completely separate from nature. I say “as if” because in reality we are all completely dependent upon nature and living in cooperation with the Earth and our fellow creatures. The Coachella Valley may receive a crash course in the interdependence when the Colorado River runs low on water. The fact is that Climate Change is gradually giving all of us this crash course in interdependence.

Our utter dependence on the natural systems of the planet is not a new idea. Indigenous cultures around the world all recognized the interconnection of humans with other organisms. The current environmental movement and earth based theology is beginning to share this idea as well. We are part of nature, yet as a species we seem determined to deny this reality and live as if we are somehow above and independent of the rest of our plant and animal relatives. Western culture, particularly developed a culture and belief system that sees humans as separate from the rest of nature.

Thomas Berry, a Roman Catholic scholar of the History of Culture and Theology who called himself a Geologian, defined a bioregion as: “an identifiable geographic area of interacting life systems that is relatively self-sustaining in the ever-renewing processes of nature. The full diversity of life functions is carried out, not as individuals or as species, or even as organic beings, but as a community that includes the physical as well as the organic components of the region. Such a bioregion is a self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-educating, self-governing, self-healing and self-fulfilling community. Each of the component life systems must integrate its own functioning within this community to survive in an effective manner.” (Thomas Berry, A Biography, Tucker and Grim, 2021) Humans, whether we like it or not, will not survive apart from the systems of the Earth that make up our bioregions. That we can live apart or separate from Nature is an illusion. Yet much of the contemporary world seems to be entrenched in this mirage.

So how do we wake up? For the people of the Coachella Valley, living within the local resources, in harmony with their environment would mean some pretty serious changes in lifestyle and many of them pretty uncomfortable. I suspect that for humanity to step out of our illusionary domes and try to live sustainably in our local eco-systems is going to mean less comfort as well. I also suspect that this change is coming one way or another. The only question is whether we rise to meet it and begin to make the changes necessary to make the transition gracefully, or if we continue to live as we are and change comes down on us cataclysmically.