Green Gettysburg Rethinking Carbon in September
–Will Lane–
The Green Gettysburg Book Club has been at it since Valentine’s Day in 2020, meeting almost every Friday on Zoom. Over that span of about five and a half years, we have read something like 37 books having to do, one way or another, with the environment. We’ve read both nonfiction and fiction, and dealt with scientists, humanists and novelists and even a poet or two now and then. Or did I dream that? Initially, some of us read Laudato Sí by Pope Francis and were inspired by its call for the development of an “ecological culture” to create this club.
Here’s a bit of what Pope Francis had to say about the matter:
“Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking… a lifestyle, and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm. Otherwise even the best ecological initiatives can find themselves caught up in the same globalized logic. To seek only a technical remedy to each environmental problem which comes up is to separate what is in reality interconnected and to mask the true and deepest problems of the global system.”
Recently, after finishing an extended discussion of the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey, we’ve been reading a series of articles that lay out in stark terms some the difficulties we are facing and that an “ecological culture” will have to address: “You Are Contaminated” by David Wallace-Wells from the New York Times and “The Human Ecology of Overshoot” by William E. Rees.
In an earlier email to book club members, I described the “Overshoot” article this way:
“The Human Ecology of Overshoot makes its main point early: ‘We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our existence. We are using up resources faster than they can be replenished and creating waste faster than it can be absorbed. Fossil fuels have enabled an eight-fold increase in human numbers and a hundred-fold expansion of real gross world product in the past two centuries, and its more than can be sustained.’
“One of the most important causes of overshoot is a belief in human exceptionalism and the neoliberal economic assumptions that underlie our economy and politics that tell us we are not bound by the laws and limits of nature. The economy and the environment are separate systems according to this way of thinking, and as technology advances the economy can grow without limits. Unfortunately, evidence is rapidly accumulating that this is not the case.”
“You are Contaminated” makes a similar case with regard to plastics, which in the form of micro-plastics have begun to accumulate in the human body. According to Wallace-Wells, even the human brain contains a significant amount, enough to fill a plastic spoon! Like it or not, we human beings are deeply entangled with the surrounding environment. We are permeable and connected, and if the air, water, and soil contain plastic we will, too!
But are there other ways to look at the deep connection between ourselves and the natural world? Our next book club reading, Carbon: the Book of Life by Paul Hawken explores the role of carbon in making possible what he calls “the flow of life” in us and in the world.
Can our deep interdependence with nature be a source of blessings as well as difficulties? Well, we’ll see. If you would like to join us for a discussion of Carbon, or would like more information about the book club, simply send an email to wlane@gettysburg.edu. And, watch this space for regular reports as our discussion of Carbon unfolds.
