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The Revolution is Love

January 29, 2016 by Charles Eisenstein 11 Comments

January 2016


I’d like to share an excerpt of the book I’m working on. It is from the beginning… (It is a first draft so be gentle!)

What made you into an environmentalist? Think back over your life to an event that inspired you with care for some special part of our planet. For me it came at about the age of seven or eight, when I was outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big flock of birds,” I said.

My father told me then about the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once filled the skies, so vast that they stretched from horizon to horizon for days on end. “They are extinct now,” he told me. “People would just point their guns to the sky and shoot randomly, and the pigeons would fall. Now there aren’t any left.” Of course, I’d known about the dinosaurs before then, but that was the first time I really understood what the word “extinct” means.

I cried in my bed that night, and many nights thereafter. That was when I still knew how to cry – a capacity that, once extinguished through the brutality of teenage boyhood in the 1980s, was nearly as hard to resuscitate as it would be to bring the passenger pigeon back to Earth.

Species extinction did not end with the 19th century. The fate of the passenger pigeon foreshadowed the calamity that is now overtaking all life on this planet, a calamity that has left none of us untouched. I recently made the acquaintance of a farmer here in North Carolina, I’ll call him Mike, a man of the earth whose family has been here for three hundred years. His thick accent, increasingly rare in this age of mass media-induced linguistic homogenization, suggested conservative “Southern values.” Indeed, he was full of bitterness, though not against the usual racial or liberal suspects; instead he launched into a tirade about the guvmint, chemtrails, the banks, the “sheeple,” the 9-11 conspiracy, and so on. “We the people have got to rise up and smash them,” he said, but it was leaden despair, not revolutionary fervor, that colored his voice.

Tentatively, I broached the idea that the perpetrators of these crimes are themselves imprisoned in a world-story in which everything they do is necessary, right, and justified; and that we join them there when we adopt the paradigm of conquering evil through superior force. That is precisely what motivates the technologies of control, whether social, medical, material, or political, wielded by those we would overthrow. Besides, I said, if it comes down to a war to overthrow the tyrants, if it comes down to a contest of force, then we are doomed. They are the masters of war. They have the weapons: the guns, the bombs, the money, the surveillance state, the media, and the political machinery. If there is hope, there must be another way.

Perhaps this is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Dear reader, do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex1 at its own game? In this book I will describe how the modern environmental movement, and most especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, not only risking defeat but also quite often worsening the situation even in its victories. Climate change is calling us to a deeper kind of revolution, a different kind of revolution, a revolution that will be unstoppable.

Mike wasn’t understanding me. He is an intelligent man (as most farmers are), but it was as if something had possessed him; no matter what I said, he would pick up on one or two cue words to pour forth more bitterness. Obviously, I wasn’t going to “defeat the enemy” by force of intellect, enacting the very same paradigm I was critiquing. When I saw what was happening, I stopped talking and listened. I listened, not so much on a conceptual level, but to the voice beneath the words and to all that voice carried. Finally I asked him the same question I am asking you: “What made you into an environmentalist?”

That is when the anger and bitterness gave way to grief. Mike told me about the ponds and streams and wild lands that he hunted and fished and swam and roamed in his childhood, and how every single one of them had been destroyed by development: cordoned off, no-trespassed, filled in, cut down, paved over, and built up.

In other words, he became an environmentalist in the same way that I did, and, I am willing to guess, the same way you did. He became an environmentalist through experiences of beauty and grief.

“Would the guys ordering the chemtrails do it, if they could feel what you are feeling now?” I asked.

“No. They wouldn’t be able to do it.”

* * *

It has been quite a process, my foray into writing a new book. I solicited support on Patreon (to crowdfund my writing sabbatical) and was moved by how many people responded. But then I felt constrained to produce something tangible, right away, otherwise I’d be letting them down. I felt like a schoolboy with an assignment due. Predictably, what I wrote in those circumstances was garbage. Then the fatigue hit me — the fatigue built up from years of intense travel and speaking. I descended into a surrendered space and basically let go of the book. It was only then that the material I’ve excerpted above came to me. The book, whose working title is “The Revolution is Love,” aims to bridge the spiritual and political dimensions of environmentalism, environmental justice, and particularly climate change.

Even when I gave up on the book, it didn’t give up on me, and neither did my supporters near and far.

At this point, I’m taking it slow, conserving and rebuilding, and trusting the writing process. That’s easy when the material is flowing; harder when that process means to write nothing for days or weeks, but rather to read, meditate, be with children, nourish my health… I’m getting over the habit of always needing to be producing something measurable. (That’s the basis of the current economic paradigm, after all, which drives the wrecking of the planet.) More and more of the quantifiable, less and less of the sacred. This time I’m taking another approach. I hope it is working. I think the book will have a lot of stories, weaving back and forth between personal and political, spiritual and systems levels.

I want to thank everyone who follows my blog and my podcasts.  That support is really important. You have been giving all along, spreading the work I do and the ideas which all of us serve.


Previous: Kind is the New Cool
Next: Grief and Carbon Reductionism

Filed Under: Ecology & Earth Healing, Short Reflection Tagged With: climate change, new story, Patreon, Short Reflection

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Julian says

    January 30, 2016 at 4:13 am

    I work with a group of academics who share an interest in tropical reforestation, spanning disciplines form social and natural sciences. The efforts are largely focused around informing policy to do ‘the right kind’ of reforestation, making sure tree plantations and ecological restoration are not categorized under the same label, giving license to corporations to green-wash their palm oil plantations. I’m truly grateful to the discussions of this group for illuminating that restoration cannot, fundamentally be separated into ecological and social realms, rather, it must encompass both. Herein lies the story of humans in nature, nature in humans.

    I have toyed with the idea of asking each member how they came to care about their work — how they came to be an environmentalist. Dispelling the notion of the scientist as neutral observer, this is a group of passionate people who care. Each of us has a story for why we do.

    Reply
  2. InDaylight says

    January 30, 2016 at 12:09 pm

    Hi Charles,
    I happened to read your article “The Problem With Society Isn’t Greed. Greed Is a Symptom of a Deep Need Going Unfulfilled”, and I deeply agree with all you’re saying.

    The excerpt you’re sharing is very touching! I’ll be keeping an eye on the book.

    I’m so glad I found your article and blog!

    Reply
  3. peter says

    January 31, 2016 at 12:39 pm

    So thankful for everything you are sharing ‘
    Perfect alignment ….. Absolutely inspiring and nourishing to the soul longing ‘
    Blessed Love is flowing ~*~

    Reply
  4. Marina says

    February 2, 2016 at 8:06 pm

    Simply beautiful! Thank you for sharing this excerpt. I look forward to reading the continuation.

    Reply
  5. Neesa says

    February 10, 2016 at 9:42 pm

    Breathing deeply as I read what you have written. Sending thanks for your clarity, courage and vulnerability. Sharing the passage of reclaiming work-life-play rhythms that are in alignment with life, stepping out of the immediacy of the productivity model that is so rapacious.

    Breathing in and out again.

    Thank you.

    Reply
  6. Shelley says

    April 4, 2016 at 12:16 pm

    So touched for your courage to be an example to live the path of LOVE !

    Reply
  7. Barb says

    November 27, 2016 at 6:53 pm

    “I’m getting over the habit of always needing to be producing something measurable. (That’s the basis of the current economic paradigm, after all, which drives the wrecking of the planet.) More and more of the quantifiable, less and less of the sacred.”

    I have hit the same place in my life (at a much greater age!) – came to the same conclusion in noticing how important it always was to do some “measurable” something each day – when what I truly wanted was to “listen” – listen to nature, listen to my heart, BE in stillness and allow truth to find me – which just doesn’t happen in all my artificial busyness.

    Your work speaks to my heart and I am grateful for the thoughts you bring together in it.. for helping me to think in new ways and examine the ideas I have taken for granted. So I honor your journey in bringing them forth. Thank you for all the energy you have expended in your effort to create the more beautiful world we all know is possible. Thank you so much.

    Reply
    • Chris Wilson says

      May 24, 2018 at 8:41 am

      Something similar has happened to me too, also at a ‘much greater age’. I was heavily involved in ‘training’ people for the ‘upcoming catastrophe’, but it just wasn’t working, so I had to let it all go. Writers like Charles, and Bayo Akomalafe (amongst others) have been a real inspiration in my journey away from Activity and towards Being.

      Reply
  8. Sage Knight says

    August 6, 2018 at 9:14 pm

    Thank you, Charles, for sharing your heart and also for honoring the ability to cry. I cry so easily and often these days. I am grateful for the reminder that my tears, precious evidence of my sensitivity, are a gift I can receive and share with ease. Your words will help me do so with more acceptance.
    Blessings,
    Sage

    Reply
  9. Zoë Foster says

    April 4, 2019 at 10:36 pm

    This is so on point and something I have been reluctant to talk about candidly for fear of being shot down, but I believe it with all my heart and soul. Thank you for your integrity and deep honouring of the creative process and its needs, and thank you for giving voice to this message of a new era! ????✨????

    Reply
  10. Danni says

    December 20, 2020 at 8:45 am

    Brilliant.

    I have often experienced the conversation you describe. I dated a Southern White Man for a while and he was brilliant, passionate, heartbroken and angry. We would talk and he would say things that I knew to be…misaligned? Untrue? He would rant at the “welfare moms” who had babies just to get money from the state, then in the next breath sing the praise of his own mother, a modern Virgin. I knew that the words he was saying were not his true feeling, but as with your farmer, any attempt to address them was latched onto and used as fuel for his rage.

    I wish that, like you, I could have somehow cut through the self deception and bluster. I suspect that, like me, you have had many more experiences where there was nothing you could do, when your speaker was too far gone to call back.

    I think, perhaps, that the lesson here is to give up on my attempts to control the outcome. I think that, maybe, what I am called to do is simply to hold space for the grief to express itself should it be ready, but to carefully refrain from cajoling it. I guess this is humility?

    Reply

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