Environmental
Peace on Earth. Peace with Earth.
What’s the connection?
There are just three ways to achieve an enduring, sustainable peace. Only one works.
There is the peace of the graveyard. It makes things peaceful, but it doesn’t work for life.
There is the peace of market capitalism, bolstered by political repression and cultural suppression. That doesn’t work either, because it is unsustainable. And the word “unsustainable” means, “It MUST fail”.
Then there is the peace of the harmonious planetary community, envisioned described by the wisest among us for thousands of years. It does work for life, and it is sustainable, yet it is the choice least interesting to those who hold the power, for now, and so the one least likely to save us from the other two.
The peace of the graveyard starts in the places where resources are being depleted, and with them the balance of earth, water, and sky that sustainable living requires. Vast regions of the sea are already depleted of fish and even of oxygen, desertifying the oceans at a pace not seen since the previous mass extinction—the previous, for this very time is the latest. The air is heating up, energizing weather disasters, raising sea levels, submerging islands and coastlines, condemning species high and low. The earth is absorbing so much carbon that falls as acid rain—what have they done to the rain?—and a climatic vicious circle has already been set in motion whose devastating consequences no one can foretell. And then there is war, and war, and another war, all the treasure and talent needed for making a new civilization sacrificed not for religion or ideology but for control of the dwindling resources without which no nation—no civilization—can survive.
The peace of market capitalism seems far more inviting. The expanding cornucopia of goods and services, the fortunes devoted to entertainment and diversion, the bright logos and commercial appeals always before us, singing to us, their cheery siren songs—but mixing with the fearful sirens of police hurrying to round up the deviant, the unproductive, the addicted, the criminal poor. The system we know and love, that puts us at the top of the global food chain and enables us to suck our life from those nearer the bottom, is unsustainable for three reasons.
First, it feeds on efficiency, which means technology continually producing more and more with fewer and fewer hands at the helm, and equally on demand for the goods and services that cause its economy to swirl ever faster like water being flushed away. But with fewer workers needed, fewer salaries are there to turn demand into purchases. The only solution is the economic meth called GROWTH. The system must expand its capacity to maintain the employment required to generated the demand to keep the productive capacity profitably engaged. Constant automation plus growth equals steady employment. But if demand should falter for any of a thousand reasons, the balance is disrupted. And merely sustaining demand is insufficient to fuel growth. The economy, demand, purchasing power all most continually expand. And “the economy” means ever more exploitation of resources, ever more production of those resources into goods for the market, ever more powerful advertising to guide and inflate demand and generate purchases and consumption, and ever more consumption generating disposability and thus mountains and finally a whole planet of waste. Techniques for extracting resources must steadily improve as the supplies created over countless millions of years are exhausted in a matter of decades, but the law of diminishing returns applies. The law of mortality also applies: nothing can grow forever—especially when the growth required to keep the balloon inflated must be exponential—a permanent snowball down the mountain. It is a cycle that feeds on itself when it works, and crumples like a soda can when it does not. And there must, MUST come a time when the resources required to uncrumple the can are not cost-effectively available. As that time approaches, the first symptom is obvious: growing structural unemployment.
That points to the second reason why the prevailing system is unsustainable: because it generates its own instability, its own vandals and enemies, the seeds of its own downfall. A system whose only purpose is to grow and grow regardless of the consequences is the global demonstration of vacuity and futility. To live to produce to consume to discard is not purpose enough to nurture the human soul. The soul recoils, and that revulsion takes form as nihilism, violent fundamentalism, and the myriad soul diseases that express themselves as obesity, addiction, fanaticism, and overwhelming cynicism toward any purpose other than to die with the most toys at the highest point of the heap. People strike out, rebel, turn to crime, terrorism, cyber attacks, and vandalism of all sorts. The already-unstable system strikes back with police, armies, robots, whatever, but the bereft soul and the twisted mind respond with new outbreaks in unpredictable places and methods, more subtle, more corrosive. More resources are required for the war against the rebellion of soul, draining resources from the struggle for social justice and cultural progress, further inflaming the rebellion. The system finds jobs for the millions needed to support the apparatus required to monitor and suppress it, and places for millions more in its ever-swelling incarceration industry—all of which fuels the rebellion. As was true with the fall of the Soviet system, finally even those at the helm wake up and wonder, what’s the point? And that brings on the end. Regardless of sophistication and technology and manpower, suppressive social control as the neat, cheap substitute for social justice turns out to be as unsustainable and any other part of the system that substitutes the ultimately pointless extract-produce-market-consume-discard cycle for true environmental sustainability. It is an asymmetric conflict in which the more resources are poured into the side of the equation representing economic and military power, the less is required on the other side to attack it, disrupt it, and drag it down. (To see that in action, try getting on an airplane.)
The third reason why this civilization cannot endure as-is traces to its motivating principle: ever-greater productivity through ever-increasing efficiency. That principle empowers technology to advance in a certain direction that makes it continually more integrated, more complex, and more ephemeral. All of those taken together make the increasingly global technological civilization increasingly subject to cascading failure. Just as there is a limit to natural resources and environmental capacity for industrial activity, there must be a limit to how seamless, how wireless, how incomprehensible the technological systems can become on which civilization absolutely depends. As that limit is approached, there is a simultaneous convergence of economic, military, social, environmental, and even health crises that previously could be treated as discrete; thus, the supremely disruption-prone crashes into the seamless, incomprehensible Mega-Threat that is converging day by day. This too is asymmetric: there need only be a relatively minor catalyst to bring the civilization down, and every human hope with it.
As there is no separating the components of the Mega-Threat, likewise the components of the way to the sustainable alternative are seamless:
Peace on Earth. Peace with Earth.
In a time of burgeoning populations, limitless demands, declining employment, and dwindling resources, peace in the world—peace anywhere in this flat, flat world—is entirely dependent on the sane allocation and exploitation of renewable resources. People say they fight for freedom, or glory, or God, but behind those words they most often fight for territory and resources, and have done so since before history began. Environmental sustainability is the absolute precondition for peace. Peace on Earth requires Peace with Earth.
Likewise, whenever and wherever there is war, and preparations for war, the environment is the first casualty. Martial insanity has the power to convince those in charge that to sacrifice the natural environment to field a weapons system or win a battle or wage a low-intensity conflict is the most trivial of concerns—even more trivial than civilian casualties. Vast areas of many countries have been polluted beyond recognition by military preparations, military bases, military operations, and the waste left behind those ultimately wasteful actions. The struggles over decades to gain political protections for the environment can be swept aside at any time for “military necessity”. Cleared forests, exhausted resources, devastated ecologies, and huge tracts littered with the carcasses of every sort of creature, human and otherwise, are the concomitants of the fear of war, the lust for war, and the illusory economic benefits of war. And beneath the ground and under the sea there lurks the abomination of desolation: the nuclear “devices” whose power, once launched into cascading fury, is not only to kill civilization but to enshroud the whole biosphere. There simply can be no Peace with Earth in the absence of Peace on Earth.
And so we come to the vision: the harmonious planetary community. As the statement of PEP’s mission and vision puts it,
PEP has recognized since its founding that justice and peace are interdependent, each required to achieve the other; and that nonviolence and disarmament must be universal if all peoples are to have the necessities of life, meaningful employment, cultural enrichment, and opportunities for personal fulfillment. Only by cherishing diversity in cultures, personal characteristics, and beliefs can the world be spared from injustice, alienation, and disruptions amplified by technology into cascading catastrophe. Increasingly PEP recognizes that only by restoring environmental harmony can all who share this planet be freed from wars engendered by scarcity and ecological devastation, and that only an enduring peace can obviate the scarcity and devastation caused by war.
As the threat of one global cataclysm is eclipsed by another, the effectiveness of PEP’s longstanding programs can be multiplied by adopting ways and means suited to the new century. …
Our time is humanity’s crucible, filled with anxiety, facing an ominous future. The new century’s promise of peace is undermined by the dread of ambiguously defined enemies—the pretext for social regression, imperial adventure, and endless war. Amplified by technology, systematic exploitation and institutionalized violence become ever more pervasive, leading many to feel marginalized, causes to seem pointless, and any real breakthrough beyond hope.
Yet that grim visage evokes a vital surge of awareness. Realizations dawn anew: that a civilization depleting its resources, disrupting its climate, and decimating its biosphere is doomed to desolation, deprivation, and darkness; that the pursuit of worldly gain leads away from life at its best; that the complex of elitism, militarism, and materialism consumes our spirits as it enshrouds the world; and that as global interdependence grows, struggles for world peace, social justice, and environmental responsibility become inseparable and must converge if any is to succeed.
From such realizations comes a vision of the future we seek: a civilization of diverse and equal peoples, freed from oppression and war, living purposeful lives guided by conscience and compassion, in harmony with their environment and each other. That vision invites us combine resources, perspectives, and talents in a hope-filled endeavor to redeem our communities, our world, and ourselves. That vision portends the promise of humanity’s destiny: to serve all life as the humble steward of this fragile garden Earth.
What is a harmonious planetary community? What would it be like? What does it take? And why is it the only way to peace on Earth and peace with Earth?
First, the planetary community comprises not only human beings, but all sentient beings. This is not merely rhetoric: only when that vision of community prevails will those who understand the value of environmental harmony be empowered to resist the forces that now drive the entire planet like a runaway train toward planetary cataclysm. It requires a transformation of the understanding of human nature and its place in the fragile shell of life that girds this particular planet:
Humanity not as the top species once at war with the others and now master of them all, entitled to all they require for life, and their very lives as well, for its own transient aggrandizement, but rather:
Humanity as the intelligence that life itself has painfully evolved over billions of years specifically for the purpose of protecting its environment and seeing that all who partake of life can do so according to their own natures. In that view, for humanity to cause a mass extinction to fuel its own essentially pointless civilization makes as much sense as for the head of a body to slake its hunger by eating its own entrails. If the intelligence of life is not engaged in safeguarding and optimizing the conditions of life for all who partake of it, then what could its purpose possibly be? For without that intelligent agency intelligently deployed, human activity will complete the mass extinction now in its beginning stage, and if not then eventually a bullet the size of a mountain will strike from space and all that evolution will have been for naught. Without the intelligence of life intelligently deployed, life itself is unsustainable.
Second, the planetary community has as its purpose the assurance of justice and equal opportunity for a decent life to all of its members. For human beings, to be deprived of that assurance in the midst of a global culture whose media portray vividly the extreme inequities once taken as normal is more or less intolerable. For the young it is intolerably intolerable, and they will listen to voices telling the why and how to strike out, to shake the mighty towers until they pancake into heaps and set the great walls afire.
Once injustice was understood to be wrong because it contradicts the mandates of every scripture. Then it was, in addition, wrong because it offended the contemporary sense of fairness and inflicted shared suffering on those sufficiently non-mechanistic to still feel empathy. Now there is a new reason—a practical one: injustice is wrong because as civilization becomes increasingly vulnerable to disruption on a cascading worldwide scale, any degree of disaffection threatens to reach the critical mass to set that cascade in motion. When teenagers in some third-world country can launch a virus that costs industry in the advanced countries billions of dollars; when nineteen men with box cutters can collapse the world’s center of international trade and bring down the entire transportation system; when a nameless researcher disgruntled with where things are headed can develop a virus with the power to decimate whole populations—the examples could go on, all demonstrating how delicately poised things are coming to be, and how necessary it is to find stability in social justice and social purpose.
And what of purpose? To manage a planet, “to bequeath to future generations a sustainable commonwealth hospitable to all who share Earth’s lands, waters, and skies” is the ultimate jobs program, the truly international Citizens Conservation Corps. For scientists to develop the means to anticipate and minimize planetary threats is the ultimate Apollo Project. For children to grow up understanding that each one is a gardener of the whole Earth, and that any threat to that garden is the enemy of all life, is the ultimate self-esteem program.
Our work now is to understand how to put that program into motion as gracefully and as quickly as possible, taking on the mighty who delude themselves about what serves their own self interest, and joining with the growing constructive power of the peace and environmental movements, the flowering of religious stewardship and cultural conscience, to find common cause in saving humanity from itself. Thus “Peace on Earth. Peace with Earth” is not just a slogan; not only a vision; not even an ultimate goal. It summarizes a specific program for transitioning from a civilization that is doomed, and imminently so, to “a new heaven and a new Earth” whose purpose is Promoting an Enduring Peace.
