Freaking people into states of fear is not productive. However, simply coddling the desire for “positive” news is also not productive.

To the extent that we desire only the truth, as elusive as it may be, the stronger and more prepared we are to deal with the challenges we face as our society inevitably changes.

Is there truth with optimism?

I often speak to high school and university students. Many are terrified and/or angry about the state of the world, the wastefulness of society, and visible ecological destruction. Such reactions remind me of my learning in my youth that our world could be vaporized by nuclear weapons. What? Are these people insane? Turns out, yes, some of our leaders are literally sociopathic and not that bright. When we’re young, our families and teachers protected us from certain disturbing realities. If we remain naïve or just ill-informed, the discovery of alarming truths about our world may create shock to our emotional system. We might react with denial, rage, or mindless television. However, the best way to never again be disillusioned is to not be illusioned in the first place.

I’m optimistic. I believe society can change. I’ve witnessed society change to achieve civil rights, women’s rights, to end slavery, or cure disease. But before we can be optimistic we must be realistic, otherwise our optimism is delusional.

Okay, most people can grok that. So then, here’s the realism: CO2 in the atmosphere is warming the planet, ancient methane now bubbles up from deep Arctic permafrost, we lose forests and topsoil daily, energy is limited and will decline, deserts grow, toxins kill land and water, aquifers shrink, rivers dry up, seafood species decline, 24,000 people will starve to death today, 75 million new humans are added to the planet each year, we now face the inevitable laws of exponential growth in natural systems, and our leaders remain virtually clueless and certainly ineffective. Our naïve presumptions of population and economic growth are not remotely tenable in timescales that account for the next few generations.

Okay, take a deep breath. This is just natural reality demanding our attention. First point on the optimism track is this: our solutions must work on the same scale as the problem. We’re not going to change this with vegan shoes and hybrid cars. We need a vast new socio-ecological paradigm shift. All the little “baby steps” are fine, but not remotely enough. So yes, change the light bulbs, get a bus pass, take out your compost, make soil, recycle everything. Great. That’s just the baseline of common sense.

But now that we’ve been realistic, we can see that the optimistic track will demand a large-scale paradigm shift, and as far as I can see it comes down to this:

1. ecology
2. community.

The two things that industrialism has trashed.

So: Take back your local community and integrate it with your local ecology. This transition will be as much about resilience as about “solutions.” Learn how ecological systems work. This is not about integrating “green” into all our bad habits, but rather about integrating humanity back into the ecology that sustains life. All human enterprise must – absolutely must – conform to ecological laws, demands, patterns, and systems. We are talking about a transition from poor, proud, mistaken Homo Industrialus to a more modest, but much happier Homo Ecologus. This is not a question of piddling around with “10% recycled paper” in Starbucks coffee cups.

So, by being realistic, by facing our anxieties, we’ve actually arrived at an authentic path to optimism rather than the delusional.

Rex Weyler
www.rexweyler.com