CHAPTER 3
Consider how Galileo felt when he pressed his eye to his home-made telescope and trained it on the Moon.
It was rudimentary, even by today’s most modest of amateur instruments. Two simple lenses in a metal tube, and nine times magnification. For the first time, though, someone could make out the details of our celestial twin, a form that until then had been little more than a smooth, luminous alabaster disk.
Galileo’s sepia paintings capture the dings blasted into the Moon’s surface by impacts with other space travellers, crater rims as fine as porcelain, and a hint of mountain ranges moulded around the distinctly spherical body.
Did he know, then, that this was the same face that has been turned Earth-ward since its birth, the sun-lit yin to the darker side’s yang?
This same Moon was pulling the tides when single-celled life took its first breath in the amniotic waters of young Earth’s oceans. The same Moon that was the spotlight as the planet’s hardening crust cracked, split, and drifted apart like lily pads on a pond. The same Moon that witnessed the dinosaurs die after a similar kind of collision that formed the Moon itself, 4.5 billion years ago, when an impact with another space object blasted free a chunk of Earth’s shell and then moulded into our silent companion who only ever shows one side of her face to us.
It is the same Moon that became a cog in our ever more sophisticated relationship with time — circadian sleep rhythms, lunar cycles, calendar years. The same heavenly body that inspired Aztec temples and The Little Prince. The same one that lit the way when Columbus got lost en route to India, washing him ashore on the New World entirely by accident. The same Moon that witnessed him unleash weapons of mass destruction on the people who welcomed him there: biological warfare through smallpox, cannons, matchlock rifles stoked with gunpowder.
The same Moon that shone through the windows of the Auschwitz death camp and now hovers over Gaza.
The same Moon that inspired the space race and that has the treads of human boots pressed into its dusty, low-gravity surface.
This Moon hangs above the suburban roofline, pot-bellied and inscrutable, one autumn evening in 2020. The handful of pneumonia cases from Wuhan have skulked out of the shadows and are now towering over us. A monstrous new plague.
I’m cross legged in the stoep chair again, drawing on another cigarette. The city suburbs are under house arrest, the night is free of traffic’s white noise. A wailing siren is that much sharper. Is this another person being rushed to a ventilator at one or other ER?
My phone rattles.
‘Look at the moon!’
I am.
We all are. Dotted about our homes across the city, it seems our whole small band of dislocated friends is facing east to the rising Moon.
We are so close in space, just a few kilometres from each other’s homes, but a world away in time, such are the shelter-in-place rules that ban us from going anywhere beyond our front gates for who knows how long.
‘Look. At. The. MOON!’
‘:-)’
‘LOOK AT THE MOON!’
‘… wow…!’
‘So beautiful.'
‘Miss you!’
‘Love you…!’
‘Hold tight, dear friends. We’ll be together again soon…’
‘Soon! Soon-soon…’
Indeed.
How long is soon?
The world is in a holding pattern. Time doesn’t make sense anymore. The Moon rises, goes to bed, rises again. We sort of do, too. But we don’t eat on schedule anymore. Or dress for company. Or auto-pilot our way through the daily commute. The novelty of this escape from routine is partial, and short-lived.
It leaves us with plenty of time to consider a new house guest: anxiety. It’s a fidgety visitor, it doesn’t sit predictably in one place, and there’s no schedule for its coming and going. It’s more there than not there, and like a mist of sulphuric acid, it condenses into burning droplets inside the chest cavity.
The palisade fence between me and the street once kept miscreants out. Now it keeps me in. Beyond these bars, the road is as quiet as a frontier town. Other than the occasional masked pedestrian passing by during the day on a quick supply run to the grocery store, the only regular faces are the people who have been living rough on the streets of the neighbourhood for years, but who I have seldom given much attention to until now. They have no home to lock down in, and law enforcement turns a blind eye to their rule breaking. They stop by often, hoping for left-overs or bread or a spare smoke.
It feels like we’re all hustling now.
Editors at my regular publishing home go quiet when I mail through story pitches on climate, because they’re galvanising their newsroom resources to cover the fire-front of the pandemic. Climate crisis stories get trampled beneath the stampede of the public health emergency. I do some back-of-envelope calculations: how long can I live off my savings, will the money see me through until work picks up again?
Winter is coming.
The neighbour’s boyfriend’s voice drifts down the stairwell: ‘Why is that lady always in her dressing gown?’
It’s 2pm. Or 4. Can’t remember. Isn’t much reason not to be in my dressing gown. Have I cleaned my teeth today?
Lots of time to do a Pooh Bear: ‘sits and thinks’. Or just ‘sits’.
Our efforts to contain the plague are a trailer to the bigger disaster movie: the systems-crash that’ll come with climate collapse. What happens when we can’t move food from farm to grocery store? How do those living on hand-to-mouth wages get what little food’s going around if the economy’s shut down and they’re penniless in their makeshift shacks out in the slums? What if starving people break out of the confines of their desperation and start hunting in the suburbs for food? Cosseted middle-class people start to feel vulnerable, the way we did back during the water crisis in Cape Town two years earlier. What if the global banking system collapses? What happens to all the digital money sitting out there in a zeros-and-ones cloud?
The informal economy in my ’hood is doing ok, though. Alcohol and cigarette sale bans turn respectable adults into delinquents, and I get a thrill from ducking into the corner cafe to buy a few boxes of under-the-counter cigarettes at four times the normal price. I don’t flinch. Instead, I gush with appreciation when the store owner slips them over the glass countertop, between the jars of pick-and-mix sweeties and bubblegum. He’s supporting the community’s mental wellbeing by breaking the law. He deserves to cream some profits.
My lungs are taking a hammering, though, so I devise a plan to make the tobacco stretch further and punish my lungs a little less. I snap each cigarette in half, smoke the bit with the factory-fitted filter, and save the rest to make some roll-ups later. Genius.
Everything’s going to shit in a pit toilet, and from my perch on the stoep I have a front row seat to the apocalypse. Might as well just keep smoking those rollies and wheeze through the intermissions.
Weeks later, Benoit asks if I get lonely during this time, being quarantined solo for so long.
‘Nope,’ I say, after a moment’s consideration. ‘There wasn’t any time to be lonely. I was too busy confronting myself. As far as company goes, I take up quite a lot of space. Not necessarily in a good way.’
We are adrift in this fragmented new world, and in that moment of Moon-rising, its consistency tethers us. It is an ephemeral thread that feeds emotional oxygen from one organism to another, filling us with a breath of life. Up there, there’s something bigger than us; something older and longer lasting.
This too shall pass.
Some time into the hard lockdown — by now, we’re measuring time by feeling, not squares on a calendar, but it’s when the streets are still eerily traffic-free — I get a nasty cough. Normally, it’d be the kind that usually means a week of hacking and the indignity of phlegm. Nothing to fret about. Now, things are different. I work myself into a froth, imagining my body’s O2 levels dropping invisibly. We’ve just learned the virus can starve us of oxygen without us feeling suffocated. You’d need a little medical device called an oximeter to tell you if you need to get yourself to ER, but all the pharmacies are sold out.
With no one to check in on me, I’m going to die alone, and my cats’re going to feed on my body until someone notices I’ve gone quiet on WhatsApp.
Apparently, they’ll start with the cheeks.
How the hell did we get here?
Simple.
In a few generations we’ve turned half the planet into a factory farm for just one species, to quote the novelist Richard Powers in The Overstory. We have cut, hacked, chopped, chainsawed and ploughed our way so deep into the wilderness that we’ve unleashed a Pandora’s box of potent little bugs that have leap-frogged from the wild, to domesticated animals, and into our population.
‘Zoonotic diseases’, an arcane phrase usually tucked away in medical and animal husbandry textbooks, becomes as common as street slang. Some new words for the Anthropocene.
Once, we were wild. Once, we were wildlife.
But then we, the wisest of primates — Homo sapiens, no less — lifted ourselves above all of that, and unwittingly unleashed pestilences and plagues.
Anthrax, consumption, smallpox, swine flu, mad cow disease, bird flu, the plague. Now, a new kind of coronavirus.
Birds of the feather
Domingo Peas Nampichkai is the real deal, even though he looks a bit out of place against the polished corporate finishes of the conference centre.
He’s not the primitive brute that the early Christian missionaries described when they encountered First Nations people of the New World. Those people who, as Amitav Ghosh describes in The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables from a Planet in Crisis, were ‘not-quite-animals, not-quite-humans’ and could therefore be enslaved or exterminated without conscience.
Domingo isn’t the noble savage, either, as the more charitable missionary types allowed for in those early writings.
He isn’t the person that today’s environmentalists might fetishise as the original conservationist. Neither is he the culturally appropriated gimmick being cosplayed on a trance-party dance floor somewhere out in the desert by mega-rich tech-bros.
Domingo is just an ordinary chap who loves his home, and doesn’t want a bunch of lumberjacks clear-felling the trees in his back yard. Although ‘his’ and ‘back yard’ don’t apply in this context, because ownership and title deeds and white picket fences are anathema to his culture.
When Domingo takes his cause to a global stage, like the World Economic Forum, or IUCN World Conservation Congress, the attire he chooses to show his stature as a leader in his community isn’t a Ralph Lauren suit, or even an off-the-rack number from a clothing chain. When he steps up to the podium, it’s with a corona of intricately stitched feathers from birds that are native to his part of the Ecuadorian Amazon: bands of scarlet, Arctic white, lemon yellow, ice crystal blue, black-hole black. The beads-and-seeds sashes that run from shoulder to waist, crossing at his sternum, are his mayoral chain. I don’t have the code to decipher the symbols drawn on his cheeks, and it seems rude to ask, but I soon realise that he’s delighted to talk about such things.
I meet Domingo in 2019 when he’s visiting the Cape to speak at a gathering organised by the Club of Rome, the global think tank that gave us the now famous, but still largely ignored, Limits to Growth report.
Back in 1972 — again, that useful half-century yardstick, the year in which I was born and a relatable timeframe against which to measure our species’ advancements on matters such as development, progress, and planetary ruin — the Club of Rome commissioned economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to do a bit of crystal-ball thinking. If we carried on with our current levels of global pollution, food production, resource use, industrialisation and population growth, they asked back when I was in nappies, what would happen?
The number-crunchers came back with a chilling warning: if we carried on with those rates of growth, by the end of the century we’d see resources running dry, and life-supporting natural systems collapsing. In short, we’d see our magical-thinking growth economics bang up against the hard laws of physics and the limits of the natural world.
We can’t have limitless growth on a finite planet, the Club of Rome said back then, and has been banging on about for half a century. And yet here we are: the industrial neoliberal Capitalist machine has churned out more carbon emissions in the five decades since that report was released, than in all the preceding 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. It’s lurched the global average temperature from the relative stability of the past 12,000 years in which our civilisation emerged, and is depositing it in an entirely new climate state. The growth curve of the carbon pollution increase hasn’t been linear. Neither is the temperature fallout, or the bonkers climate that’s spilling over from that.
The 2019 gathering was a chance to come home to Africa, the organisers said. It was a return to the mother continent to see what the world can learn from indigenous wisdom and knowledge systems about a different way of being in the world.
When Domingo takes to the podium, he represents an alliance of 30 indigenous nations groups, the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance, who have spent decades fending off the looting of their forests by timber merchants, corporate miners, and agri-business. The fight is as much against the corporates who are profiting from unfettered access to the Amazon, as it is a challenge to the governments who are enabling the plunder by selling off these wild spaces to the highest bidder.
He and his alliance partners aren’t just fighting to protect their own little pockets of forest, Domingo tells me over dinner one night. They’re not just fighting to stay on their ancestral lands. They’re protecting an ecosystem that is as critical to the planet as a heart is to a human body.
‘This planet is like a human body,’ he says through his translator. ‘If the Amazon isn’t doing well, it will impact the whole continent. If Africa isn’t doing well, the rest of the planet will suffer.’
‘We are part of a whole, like a body. If I am cut off from my foot, I’m not whole.’
Domingo’s activism connects with the global. His daily life, embedded in the forest, connects him with the local, but also the metaphysical.
‘For us, nature is medicine. It is our family, it is our home, it is our everything. There is no separation from nature. For us, it is sacred. We converse with nature. We talk with the trees, and the rivers. For us, even a rock is a spirit.’
This is as normal for him as rosary beads are to a Catholic, or the call to prayer for a Muslim.
This view of the world is what indigenous traditions in Africa call ubuntu — I am, because we are — and it doesn’t just apply to people’s connection with and dependence on other people. It applies to our relationship with the totality of the natural world, and speaks to the interdependence of all life on Earth.
The visitor
During lockdown, an olive thrush takes to breakfasting in the front garden most mornings. Sometimes she brings her mate, mostly she flies solo, but she always returns to her favourite spot.
There’s a patch of balding ground between the buchu bush and the Cape honeysuckle that I’m trying to rehabilitate. I layer it regularly with fallen frangipani leaves, the rung-out coffee grounds from the daily kick-start, and tea leaves from the rest of the day’s caffeine top-ups. The bird picks through this lot, turning over caps of mulch to expose white fungal threads and the occasional worm. She cocks her head — is she taking me in? — but mostly her attention is on the task of grubbing about for wiggly things.
Besides the two cats, who I shut indoors when she arrives, hers is one of the few faces I get to see most days.
The olive thrush, Turdus olivaceus. This is how we humans have anointed her kind.
What does she call herself, though, and what is her sense of self? What does she call her mate? What names do they use when they chatter with their kids, once spring brings a clutch of eggs?
What is the word she uses to refer to the cream-coloured, mostly hairless ape perched on its rump nearby, wrapped in plumage that it moults and re-grows in new colours every day.
The bird flits in and out of the garden, not minding the fence along the border or any notion of property rights that demarcate where ‘my’ piece of planet Earth ends and where the municipality’s pavement begins. She isn’t confined by the lockdown rules that say I may not pass through the gate between these two physical spaces.
She is most likely unaware of where she fits into our ranking of the natural world.
We decide where she ranks when we have answered the question: is she intelligent?
But it’s the wrong question. We should be asking: how is she intelligent?
In the hours between when the olive thrush comes and goes, I’m reminded of a social media moment a few years earlier that let me eavesdrop on the life of a kindergartener.
The little girl tells her mum that she’s going out into the garden to play.
‘Won’t you be lonely out there on your own?’ her mum asks.
‘No… I’ll have the sunbeams with me…’
As the lockdown exile drags on, when the hollowing out becomes too much, I draw on the wisdom of this child and try an exercise in perspective-shifting. I take time to notice the frangipani tree in the rectangle of garden between my perch and the palisade prison bars. I have no idea how old this tree is. It’s been here as long as I’ve lived here, and longer. For a decade, I’ve watched it shed its canopy each winter, standing bald as a coot until spring, and then waited for its intoxicating ivory-and-yellow flowers to open like apertures, which sit for a while on the branches, and then thup onto the pavement where passers-by can’t help but pick them up and wander off down the road, their noses buried in the blossoms.
The tree seems to be motionless, but we know it’s not. It’s blood pumps, but through different veins; its sap defies gravity using a different kind of heart; it carries its own unique mix of nutrients; it breathes through a different kind of lung. The cadence of its feet, stirring in the earth, is to its own rhythm. It speaks its own language, with a timbre that my eardrums aren’t attuned to hear.
The word ‘different’ is the clue. It’s our human exceptionalism writ large. Our biology, our consciousness, our subjective experience, limited as they are, have become the central reference point against which we measure, rank and value those that aren’t us.
The deeper we get into lockdown, the more I feel, as Ursula le Guin writes in her poem Kinship, ‘rootless and restless and warmblooded’ compared with the groundedness of the frangipani. The ‘blazing flare’ of my own human-ness blinds me to the ‘slow, tall, fraternal fire of life of a tree that is as strong now as in the seedling’, however many years ago that may have been.
The solitary tree in my garden is a reminder of the forest that is the central character in Anna Proulx’s novel Barkskins.
The barkskins is what she calls the early colonisers in North America, whose skin was as tough and wrinkled as a tree’s hide, and who made their living from felling timber.
The solitary tree in my garden is a reminder of the many others that have been toppled by generations of barkskins. The axmen who, clearing on our behalf, have helped turn half this planet into a factory farm just for us humans.
Ursula le Guin describes passing timber trucks as funeral processions.
The modern-day barkskins that Domingo is trying to fend off in the Amazon are a different breed altogether. Gone are the days of the hand-wielded blade and the calloused palms. Today’s tree slayers are industrial-scale machines, set in motion by people sitting in corporate offices half a planet away, that can pluck a tree from the ground like a daisy flower and strip it of its branches in minutes, clear-felling generations of trees at a rate that no 18th-Century axman could have imagined possible.
During these many echoing hours in quarantine, I sit with the frangipani tree and search for kin: the sunbeams streaming through its blunt, naked branches; the Cape robin that alights on its limbs occasionally; the white eyes that chitter in the honeysuckle hedge just after sunrise; the buchu bush that’s outgrowing itself beneath the tree’s canopy; the anticipation of bees that will swoop in to find the fragranced blossoms, come spring.
This is an intentional exercise. It’s a brain-training practice as deliberate as pulling on running shoes and hitting the mountain trail for a few kays. It does come more easily with time, like any form of fitness, and is it real or imagined that I feel a little less alone when I do it?
For someone like Sinegugu Zukulu, though, seeing his kin all around him is as natural as breathing. It happens without him needing to think about it.
Sinegugu and I meet at the same Club of Rome event. He’s speaking alongside Domingo, and while their words and accents differ, their cosmologies gestated in the same womb.
Sinegugu is from the amaMpondo nation on a stretch of the Wild Coast about three hours’ drive south of the port city of Durban. The amaMpondo’s spiritual connection with the grasslands, forests, ocean and wildlife that surround them is why they’ve spent 20 years fighting legal battles to stop a proposed titanium mine, a national road that would slice through the coastal wilderness here, and plans by the energy super-power Shell to detonate sonic bombs along the ocean floor offshore of Algoa Bay to search for oil and gas deposits.
The amaMpondo’s devotion to nature, and fierce defence of it, isn’t because of some romantic notion of Eden, or because they believe they’ve been appointed by a god as its custodian. This is the Western Christian view.
I ask Sinegugu for his credentials, because journalists have to give their sources credible sounding titles. He helpfully describes himself as a conservationist, an ecological infrastructure specialist and an expert in indigenous knowledge, but I think I hear bemusement in his voice. He may have a masters in environmental management, but his knowledge of the amaMpondo culture is because this is how he has lived and breathed for as long as he’s been aware. There is no job title for this kind of knowledge.
He does have a knack for explaining to a Western-conditioned thinker like myself where the amaMpondo’s connection with nature comes from. For them, this world and the spirit world are entwined, and nature is the touchpoint where these two realms meet.
Some religions believe that when a person enters the spirit realm, they’re assigned to an ever-after in a distant place called heaven or a destination called hell. Some believe there’s a cycle of death and rebirth and death and rebirth, until we finally nail this being-human thing, and the soul is set free from bodily suffering. An African spiritualist believes that when someone dies, the realm they settle in isn’t some far-off place. They’re right here, close by. They dwell amongst us, they speak with us through our dreams, through soothsaying-healers and through signs. They believe that our ancestors linger in the same places that they loved when they were here in their physical bodies. A favourite pool, a beloved forest grove, a hilltop, a tidal pool.
‘Those who have passed on cling to the places that are close to their hearts,’ Sinegugu tells me, speaking of an ancient wisdom but over a new-fangled technology called Zoom. ‘Just like living people are everywhere, so are those who have passed on.’
‘There are those who reside in the ocean,’ Sinegugu says, ‘some are in the mountains. Some reside in waterfalls, some in deep, beautiful, peaceful pools, some in forest channels.’
To understand the amaMpondo’s belief system, you need to see our daily practices, he insists. A walk through the grasslands will uncover all the medicinal plants tucked away amongst the grazing. This is why they won’t plough up all the virgin land. Some natural veld must stay intact. Healers will only collect bark from the north-facing side of a medicinal tree, so it doesn’t die.
Traditional healers give thanks and show respect to trees— the isiXhosa word is hlonipha — and ask that they imbue powers into the medicine. Sangomas pay homage by giving the tree gifts of white beads or silver coins.
‘In customary law, we are not allowed to cut down fruit-bearing trees, because they give food to wildlife, like birds, bees and insects, and to strangers on long journeys.’
This thinking is present in day-to-day conservation decisions that are practical, but deeply rooted in the metaphysical. Out of respect for the ancestors, and the need to keep in good standing with them — ancestors have the power to punish us if we stray — a conservation practice might take the shape of a ritual or lore.
Children are taught not to wee in the river. If you do, they’re warned, a girl will turn into a boy, or a boy will turn into a girl. The result: the river isn’t treated as a urinal, and the water stays unpolluted.
Take the practice of burning a firebreak. Farmers everywhere know the importance of firebreaks, but also why they’re risky to burn. If a fire gets away from you, it can cause serious harm to someone else’s property.
The amaMpondo, who live in clusters of homesteads amidst lush grasslands, have a practice for how to go about burning firebreaks. It is a cultural protocol that is respectful of the ancestors but is also an act of good neighbourliness.
As the Buddha said, in his universal way: be nice, don’t be kak (a shit).
‘When you make a firebreak, you have to start the fire at the right time,’ Sinegugu explains. ‘You have to inform your neighbours so they can be on standby if the wind picks up speed and causes a runaway fire.’
If a fire does run wild, though, and burns through neighbours’ homesteads — particularly if it burns through the family cemetery — the belief is that the people in the graves will begin burning, and will continue burning, even after the physical fire has been put out.
‘We say those people lying in the graves are burning. We don't say they're burned.’
The deceased will remain on fire until a ritual is done to douse the metaphysical flames. This involves slaughtering an animal, sprinkling the contents of its gallbladder, and serving traditional beer.
The cost of the ritual is borne by those who started the fire, as an apology for the damage they caused.
It is this kind of community spiritedness — their relationship with those in this realm, and those in the here-after — that is the keystone of the amaMpondo’s legal argument when they take on the Shell oil and gas prospecting case to challenge the licence given by government to allow Shell to conduct seismic surveys in the ocean. The amaMpondo’s argument is that government hasn’t consulted with local communities as the country’s environmental statutes require. Woven into this legal argument, is the community’s cosmology: the potential damage caused by the sonic bombs wouldn’t just disrupt one or two random sea animals, it will tear into the fabric of the spirit world.
‘Shell’s disruption of the ocean risks disrupting and disturbing those who have passed on, and the living don’t know what it may lead to in their lives,’ Sinegugu says.
Shell’s lawyers try to dismiss this argument as nonsense, but the court rules in the amaMpondo’s favour, a tip of the hat to their customs and beliefs.
Collective decision-making is also a fulcrum of the amaMpondo way of life. Day-to-day decisions about who can settle where, how families manage their livestock, and how they harvest from nearby forests, for instance, are done as a community. That’s why, when Shell and government come to a unilateral agreement that Shell can send its prospecting ships down the East Coast, the amaMpondo argue in court that this is anathema to their culture. It’s not just that South Africa’s laws require community consultation, it’s that the culture does, too.
This sense of the communal over the individual, and the knowledge that the ancestors are still amongst us, is present in how the amaMpondo manage their pastures, their water sources, the forests, game, livestock, and their interaction with the ocean which is the final resting place for those who have passed on.
‘The way that we manage the fires, the way we manage the harvest, the rain, springs, it is in the knowing that we are not the only ones who are alive,’ Sinegugu says.
Sure, he says, there are ways in which these traditional approaches fail, too. But in his and Domingo’s telling of their stories, there’s a hint here of how there may be a different way of doing things, a way that echoes of a relational way of being that harkens back to our roots as a species.
Suicidal economics
The Club of Rome event isn’t a nostalgic trip down anthropology lane, and Domingo and Sinegugu’s beliefs aren’t presented here as quaint artefacts of a lost and romanticised world. The logic of their world view is clear in the red and black ink of today’s economic ledger.
The numbers in the ledger are clear, too: this growth economics is collective suicide.
This sentiment has been popping up on protest posters for years: How can we destroy life for money and profit?
And yet still the system keeps on keeping on, as a dominant world view and ideology cement themselves. Capitalism has helped commodify just about everything. A person becomes a unit of labour. A cow becomes x-number of cuts of meat sold at y-number of dollars per kilo. A 2,000-year-old tree is no longer a subject, with it’s own experience of the world, it is an object that can be sawed into z-number of planks and sold as timber for some or other piece of furniture.
Since the 1970s, neoliberalism turbocharged growth economics, and schooled generations of business and government leaders in the false assumption that the economy can be built on unlimited growth, that wealth will trickle down into the ruts and grooves of global poverty, that it will somehow level off the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Instead, it has become a predatory Capitalism that has led to this predictable collapse, not just of the climate system, but of other life-supporting systems such as healthy soil, forest, and water systems. Humanity consumes something like 1.7 times what Earth can sustain, which comes at the cost of destroying the regenerative systems that we need to maintain the health of the Earth and everything living on it, including us. But the consumption footprint isn’t spread evenly across the globe. A small number of rich gobble up the bulk of what we’re using, leaving crumbs for the poor.
The promised trickle-down has also not happened, with the rich only getting richer and the poor more desperate, exploited, and powerless.
In 2019, Oxfam estimated that twenty-six billionaires held personal financial assets greater than those of the poorest half of humanity, 3.9 billion people. The influence that this handful of individuals has over politicians, media, education, research, and society gives them a greater say in economic policy-making than all the rest of Earth’s 7.7 billion humans.
By 2024, Oxfam reckons the five richest men on Earth had doubled their wealth since the pandemic. That’s right, while around five billion got poorer after the shockwave of the plague knocked so many of our regional economies out at the knees, these obscenely rich people managed to amass even more money.
The Oxfam Inequality Inc report lists these five individuals: LVMH chief Bernard Arnault, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, investor Warren Buffet, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. If each of them spent a million bucks a day, it would take them nearly 500 years to burn through their loot.
How much more money does any one person really need? Particularly when it comes at the cost of the wellbeing of everyone and everything else?
The solutions to this cancerous economic system are right in front of us, and they have been for years. Hashtag: DoughnutEconomics. Hashtag: Degrowth. Hashtag: CircularEconomics. Hashtag: NeedsNotGreeds. Hashtag: dontbekak.
It’s not a question of a shortage of fixes. The problem is that the people who will lose their place at the top of the social pile don’t want to let go of their wealth and power. That’s why we need a revolution.
The stories we tell ourselves
Storytelling is one of humanity’s oldest technologies. The stories we tell ourselves have shaped how we’ve organised ourselves for 200,000 years. Most of that time, we were hunter-gatherers, where nature was our kin, through which we wandered in small, extended family groups where cooperation was more important to our survival than competition. It’s only for the past 12,000 years that we’ve settled down to become anxious, insecure property-owning, resource-hoarding farmers and city folk.
And it’s literally only in the past few generations that we’ve become Homo sapiens, the ‘wise’, rational, masters of a brutal, scary, natural world, and Homo economicus, the selfish, competitive loners that today’s economists tell us we are.
The stories we have told ourselves over generations are how we’ve shared values, agreed to social norms, and passed on knowledge. We’ve used storytelling to beat the plough shear into sword (think: World War II), and sword into plough shear (think: South Africa’s relatively peaceful transition to democracy after apartheid ended in 1994). We’ve wielded this technology for great good (think: sharing the genetic sequencing of the coronavirus to fast-track vaccine production), and for terrible harm (think: the Rwandan genocide).
There are many chapters in the unfolding history of how we got to be where we are today as a species, gobbling up Earth’s resources and seemingly blind to our self-destruction or unmoved by how much suffering we’re causing others.
The so-called ‘Western narrative’ that has become today’s dominant story is only a few hundred years old, as Jeremy Lent shows in his sweeping history-of-ideas book The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning.
One-god religion gives us an Eden stuffed with plants and animals that are created by god, and we, god’s favourite, are appointed as their overlords. In this recent human ‘selfie’, other-than-humans are no longer gods in their own right, or our close kin; they are our underlings and we can use them as we see fit.
Descartes gives us dualistic thinking, where the purity of mind and spirit is separated from the messiness of the physical body. The Enlightenment brings us the materialism of science which tells us that nature is like a clock: if we can open it up, study its cogs and gears and springs, and understand how it works, we can tinker with its mechanisms and improve on it.
These developing chapters in the story of how we understand the world drive a wedge between us and the web of life, giving us a sense of entitlement over the natural world that is there for us to exploit, dominate, and used for our benefit. And then comes Capitalism: now, the web of life that was once our kith and kin, is little more than a collection of exploitable objects, each with a dollars and cents value. Commodified, it is only valued in terms of its utility in how it can feather our nest, it is not valued simply because it is a nest in and of itself.
In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh outlines the next layer of ‘othering’ that adds a particularly bloodthirsty character to the Western narrative. In addition to ranking and valuing nature according to our new lofty sense of self, the narrator of the modern story does the same to humans, creating an artificial social hierarchy that places white European-origin people — men, in particular — at the apex of power, and everyone else ranked and valued relative to them: women, people of colour, religions or ethnic groups that inhabit the margins of the mainstream, and other-than-humans.
In the continuum of ‘human’ on one end of the spectrum, and brutish ‘nature’ on the other, where does the ‘non-European’ of the 17th and 18th and 19th-Century sit? Were they part human, part animal? By deciding that they are not fully human, European empire builders justify the enslavement and extermination of the people of Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the many islands in between.
If you don’t see a San Bushman in South Africa as human, or an Aboriginal Australian as your equal, you can justify issuing a hunting license to have them killed. Or, as a German coloniser, you can explain away a decision to drive tens of thousands of Herero and Nama into a desert in South West Africa and trap them there until they die of thirst and hunger. Or you can give grounds to chop off the hands of rubber harvesters in Belgian Congo if they don’t bring in enough tree sap on any given day. Or you can deliberately infect people with smallpox by distributing blankets contaminated with the virus.
The extermination of indigenous people and the extermination of nature are on the same continuum, Ghosh argues.
In the context of race and racism in the US, journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson looks at skin colour as a veneer for something that’s better viewed as a form of caste system.
A caste system is a way for the powerful to create an artificial hierarchy that allows them to enjoy respect, social rank, access to resources, and the power to write society’s rules in their favour. It is a social construct that allows them to privilege themselves at the expense of others and can use any number of parameters to create the ranking system: race, gender, tribe, nationality, language, religion, economic class.
If today’s dominant Western narrative could be written in such a relatively short period of history — which marginalises, dehumanises, and exploits with its ferocious limitless-growth economic delusion — could we not re-write something new and better just as quickly?
To do so, though, we need to insist that society’s dominant voices shush up and allow others to speak, including the Domingos and Sinegugus of the world. But their voices aren’t invisible from the village square simply because of old-school bigotry against the keepers of indigenous wisdom and science.
In some parts of the world, environmental defenders are being shut down and silenced more permanently because they are ‘inconvenient’ to profit-taking extractivists.
The organisation Global Witness reckons that nearly 2,000 indigenous environmental activists were murdered or killed on the job between 2012 to 2022 in the David-vs-Goliath battle to protect the land, forests, rivers, wildlife, culture and the global common good of a stable climate from predatory exploitation by corporations and complicit governments.
In 2006, Sinegugu nearly joined these ranks. He became the face of amaMpondo’s resistance to the titanium mine when the news media first started covering the story that year.. This is a small community, and after the story broke word got back to him via a cousin that someone had been hired to silence him. Permanently.
A few well-placed phone calls, and the hit was called off. But ten years later, Sinegugu’s cousin Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Rhadebe wasn’t so lucky. After this planned hit on Sinegugu, Bazooka got drawn into the same environmental activism, and before long was elected as the chair of one of the main community coordinating groups, the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), which was becoming louder and more organised as its momentum grew.
Sometime in 2016, Bazooka got wind of the fact that there was another hit list doing the rounds, and his name was at the top of it.
One evening that year, two men dressed as policemen arrived at Bazooka’s home, saying they needed to take him to the police station for questioning. Next thing, Bazooka’s 15-year-old son heard eight gunshots ring out. Bazooka was shot dead at his front door. The murder was never properly investigated and to this day his killers haven’t been found.
Another person on the hit list was ACC co-founder Nonhle Mbuthuma. After Bazooka’s death, Nonhle had to have body guards accompany her until it seemed as though the worst of the threat had passed.
Nonhle and Sinegugu have stayed at it, though, and fearlessly. The titanium mine threat is now in the rear-view mirror, but the Shell seismic survey licensing application is the new front for them to defend.
In April 2024, Nonhle and Sinegugu received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for their efforts to thwart Shell, an award that came a few weeks before the South African courts were due to give another ruling on whether or not Shell’s prospecting licence could be issued or not. The battle continues.
New words from the Anthropocene
The beauty of dictionaries is that they’re living things, evolving in step with our own changing way of storying the world. But this particular era in human history is giving us some words and phrases that don’t reflect well on us at all. In between lockdown cigarettes and rejected story pitches to editors, I start to put together a list of terms that pop up online, because they match my mood.
Anthropocene: the new geological epoch defined by one species — humans — becoming a geophysical force on the planet. We are powerful enough now to bring about the kind of change that once was the preserve of mighty forces like continental drift, uppity volcanos, or asteroid impacts. Scientists are still arguing about precisely when the epoch should be regarded as having started (see ‘Plasticene’, ‘Capitalocene’, ‘mushroom cloud’, and ‘bomb carbon’, below). At this point, it doesn’t really matter what term the geology textbooks will eventually agree on, and their authors are perhaps clocking up a few too many carbon miles to get to all the conferences where they’re thrashing out this rather costly bit of semantics.
Polycrisis: everything going to shit, everywhere, all at once. Synonyms include metacrisis and permacrisis, the latter of which is the Collins Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year.
Homosphere: this word has been repurposed from the atmospheric sciences by environmental lawyer, rights-of-nature advocate and author of Wild Law Cormac Cullinan to reflect the dangers of our human-centric perspective. ‘It’s a mental construct that we’ve created, that humans live only within a human world and are surrounded by a hostile, alien world of nature that’s full of danger and potential threat.’ It is a ‘self defeating mindset’ that plays out in our efforts to control and dominate nature. But the same domination and control plays out in human societies, too. See 'Amitav Ghosh', above.
Homo economicus: economists, bless their hearts, have decided that humans act in our rational self-interest, that we’re selfish, greedy and individualistic.
Toxic individualism: basically, that we’re self-serving arse-hats. Take the notion of human exceptionalism (see ‘homosphere’), riff off the idea that we’re Homo economicus, add a touch of Atticus Shrugged, en voilà, you’ve got a nasty 4x4-driving bully out there on the roads, swerving between lanes and jumping stop streets, not bothering about who he flattens in the process.
Forever chemicals: nasty toxins cooked up in labs and put into packaging, clothing, cleaning products and the likes. They take centuries to break down and spread ill as they do so, some causing cancer. We’re picking them up in alarmingly high levels in food and water.
Mushroom cloud: self-explanatory. Ka-BOOM. See ‘bomb carbon’ below.
Plasticene: plastic production took off in the 1950s. Few plastics break down into compostable materials, so just about every bit of plastic ever made and that has escaped into the environment is still out there, embedding itself in the geological record. So we have a brand new sedimentary layer that we can use to describe this era of human-caused planetary changes. An alternative to the Anthropocene.
The Capitalocene: as per the original blog by Professor Stephen Tooth at Aberystwyth University, ‘a term that formally acknowledges the fact that the main driver of changes to the Earth’s environment – and potentially its geological record – has been the rampant growth of capitalism.’
The Hollowscene: this draws on our emotional experience of today, acknowledging that we are ‘left forlorn and bereft of meaning and purpose’. It’s riffing off the name for the ‘Holocene’, the epoch that started when humans settled down to become agriculturalists about 12,000 years ago and running until now-ish, i.e. the start of the Anthropocene (exact time yet to be determined). The Hollowscene, another gem from Prof Tooth, is pretty much what this book is about.
Bomb carbon: nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s cooked new isotopes into being, including doubling the amount of carbon-14 circulating in the atmosphere, oceans, and Earth sediments. Great for carbon-dating things, but another marker of humans stamping ourselves into the geological record.
Carbon bomb: fossil fuel mega-projects that’ll blast us past our agreed-upon carbon reduction targets.
A new term starts to take shape. It grows out of the compost of an idiom that’s starting to sit uncomfortably. It occurs to me that we shouldn’t be too quick to say that we don’t suffer fools gladly. Who am I to know who the fool in the room is, and who isn’t? Maybe I’m the fool?
Here we humans are: we’ve assessed ourselves as being the pinnacle of evolution, ignoring that we are outgrowing our ecological niche and destroying our home. There’s a whole medical specialisation dedicated to studying this kind of organism: oncology.
And yet still there are some of us who think we can pop off to Mars to terraform a lifeless planet so we can continue our expansion. To think that we can build from scratch, in a human lifetime or two, what took 3.5 billion years of evolutionary tinkering to figure out here on Earth?
The new phrase makes it onto the list.
13. Homo hubris.
Gravity vs the king
But there are more pressing things afoot.
The queen is dead. Long live the king.
The Elizabethan age comes to a dramatic end on a September afternoon in 2022, when the announcement comes from Buckingham Palace that the beloved monarch is no more. Days of mourning follow, with the House of Windsor’s usual pageantry and theatrics: the crown jewels put out for viewing, some set with diamonds the size of a child’s fist — thank you, pillaged Colonies — and a bunch of protocols that, if breached in a previous era, would have landed someone in the slammer, aka the Tower of London.
A fever of sentiment and jingoism sweeps Britain, infects the Commonwealth, and gives some in the rest of the world a touch of the sniffles.
Heartbroken by her death — as a person, queenie does sound like she was a bit of a mensch — Britons are now contemplating what kind of a king the rather dour Charles will make.
He’ll have to drop all that environmental activism, the pundits say. The head of the royal family may be the head of state — inherited, unelected, the right hand of god, holding the highest mandate of all, and all that malarkey — but British law says he can’t get his hands dirty with the actual politics of running the country.
No more using his platform to push a climate agenda.
None of the talking heads on telly mention anything about the one immutable fact, though: that the rules of physics kneel before no man, or manmade institution, or title, or law. There will be no House of Windsor or head to wear any crown without a stable climate. It doesn’t matter if you’re a self-described republican, or a royalist; you don’t have to believe in gravity, gravity still has a hold on you.
The other thing that the pundits don’t mention amidst the spectacle is Pakistan.
As the crown changes heads, Pakistan goes down under a torrent of floodwaters. Fast-melting glaciers and heavy rains inundate a third of the country. Nearly 1,800 people die, 8 million are displaced, and, according to the World Bank, the bill for the damages runs to almost US$15 billion, and the economic losses add up to about that, again.
No one wants to be that person at the party, but few journalists joined the dots between Britain’s generations-long contribution to the pollution that brought on this event, and the centuries of Imperial and Colonial extraction that left the country so ill equipped to cope with a disaster like this.
One or two leftie commentators point out the callousness of the Brits putting the royals’ eye-watering wealth on display as women in Pakistan are forced to leave their dead infants on the roadside while they flee to safety because they can’t find a way to dig even a modest grave.
The ink has barely dried on this story when Prince Harry’s memoir Spare hits the shelves. It becomes the fastest selling non-fiction book in history, confirming the public’s unending appetite for the royal soap opera, so lavish, so carefully stage-managed, and with real jewels.
But the contents of the book also reveal the pact between the House of Windsor, the tax-paying public, and the media: we pay, you pose, and the media completes the transaction. Who wants to think about their responsibility towards drowned Pakistanis when you can badmouth a royal in-law for wearing a hat that looks like the product of a dog’s colon. That was an actual discussion point on social media once.
In my 20s I listened to the Roger Waters album Amused to Death on loop. I must have worn an erosion donga in the disk. Today, I listen to it with a new ear. Back then it was for rebels and misfits. It still is, but today it feels like the soundtrack for our times, the anthem for the Anthropocene: when the alien anthropologists one day sift through the remains of our civilisation, Waters sings, they will find us crowded around our TV screens, and they’ll wonder what brought about our ruin.
… on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise,
they logged the only explanation left:
this species has amused itself to death.
We watched the tragedy unfold,
We did as we were told,
We bought and sold.
It was the greatest show on Earth.
But then it was over,
We ohhed and aahed,
We drove our racing cars,
We ate our last few jars of caviar.
No tears to cry, no feelings left,
This species has amused itself to death.
Earth rising and the ‘overview effect’
Consider how astronaut Bill Anders must have felt in 1968 when, suspended in zero gravity, he peeked out the window of the Apollo 8 and saw Earth rising up over the curvature of the Moon’s horizon. His job at the time was to capture the goings-on inside the ship’s cabin, but when he saw this sight, he turned his lens outwards. He thought it’d make for a great pic.
He wasn’t wrong.
Earth Rising is one of the most important images in the history of our species. It captures the shift in perspective that astronauts call the ‘overview effect’: the moment when they leave Earth’s atmosphere, see the planet drifting in the darkness of space, and realise that this is home. This is our only home.
It helped birth the environmental movement.
Astronomer Carl Sagan helped bring about the same sense of shifting perspective two decades later when NASA’s Voyager beamed another portrait of Earth back home, this time taken from so far away that the planet is barely the size of a pixel in the image.
Of the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photograph, he said this:
That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant… every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.
Our posturing and self-importance, he says, our delusion of privilege. But when we’re confronted with the vastness of space, we realise that no one is coming to rescue us. We have to save ourselves.
Plague-era house arrest gives me a different perspective on space, though. After all these weeks in solitude, I feel as though gravity has forgotten about me, that I’m drifting from the surface of this pale blue dot, that I’m free to float off into the darkness of space.
Months later, the data will begin to trickle in: the number of people whose occasional glass of wine becomes a bottle-a-day habit; the irksome OCD tick that becomes a full-on can’t-be-with-people phobia; the people under eating or over eating or trying wacky diets to claim some kind of control in the chaos of a world in a state of pause and paralysis; the lost hope and purpose; the bewilderment and the grasping for meaning; the spike in hospitalisations because people simply come undone; the many deaths of despair.
Before these figures come out, though, before they can comfort us by letting us know that we aren’t alone in our unravelling, most of us come undone quietly and shamefully in the privacy of our homes.
We give in to our loneliness.
Loneliness, as uncomfortable as it is, is one of the reasons we were able to evolve into the emotionally tapestried great ape that we are today. In those earlier years roaming the African savannah, those of us who felt a sense of disquiet by being separated from our kin for too long would hurry back to the safety of the collective. We’d be more likely to pass our genes on. The loners and outsiders, not so much.
COVID allows us to experience the many flavours of loneliness. We can be in 24/7 confinement with our intimate other, but pine for our running buddies. A Zoom call with the book club has a different sense of connection compared with sitting down at dinner with the teenage offspring, even if a bad case of adolescence has struck them mute. Being confined at home does not mean being able to escape into the cathedral of the nearby forest to decompress after work, leaving an ache of its own kind. We long for connection in different ways, and with different beings.
Feeling lonely nudges us back towards sociability. We’ve evolved to gather. But being lonely for too long makes it hard to get back into the group, something many say they feel after plague quarantine measures lift. Spend too much time alone, research shows, and we struggle to reintegrate into a group. Our social anxieties rise. We’re primed for rejection cues in others’ body language or faces, and we’re on high alert for any signs that others might dislike or disapprove of us. We’re afraid of being exiled, so we exile ourselves first.
During those early plague weeks, with the Moon waxing and waning and waxing again, and my dressing gown getting pockmarked with ash burns from all the roll-ups, I am an astronaut, newly liberated from the bounds of needing attachment and human contact. I quietly orbit Earth. I’m tethered to it still, by some umbilical cord. I can hear muted chatter and laughter somewhere down there. But the further I drift, the more indistinguishable the sounds become. The further I drift away, the more comfortable I become in the itchiness of this dark, muted, airless isolation. The longer I hold on out here, the harder it is to imagine a return.
Out here, though, there is no Moon.
Months later, I tell Mark the New Therapist that this was where the germ of the idea comes from: to take the stamina I developed for isolation during quarantine, and see how far I can push it. If a person can retreat even deeper into hermitage, cut themselves off from human contact as completely as anyone can in a busy hyper-populated world, surely they’ll be able to master this most distasteful of human experiences: the disquiet of loneliness. If one can tame this beast, one will truly have set oneself free, no?
Mark the New Therapist raises an eyebrow.
‘That plan didn’t end so well, did it?’