The view from here

It’s taken me a long time to write this. Being in Malawi is a huge change in perspective for me. I find it very different to see Canada and North America from a distance, to be living in a country that is very much not part of the G7 or G8. It’s taken time for me to make sense of what I’m seeing, but the view is finally becoming clear enough for me to write about it.

From here, I can see that for my whole lifetime I have been living on a gigantic ship that’s sinking; that’s been taking on water ever since I was born.

I know that how we live our lives in North America seems normal. We get up, do our morning routines, get the kids off to school and ourselves off to work, have very busy days, and possibly very busy evenings, too. We watch TV. We shop at the places where other people shop, buy things that other people buy, eat things that other people eat. It’s all normal.

We’ve been living like this, to a greater or lesser extent, for three or four generations. My grandparents experienced something radically different in their childhood, but their late adulthood was very much like my life. They watched television, drove cars, worked at businesses I recognize, shopped at grocery stores like those I shopped at, ate similar foods. My parents grew up in this culture. I grew up in this culture. It seems normal to me.

Those of us who are alive now don’t have any memory of what the world around us was like before. We’re just working and living and dancing on this beautiful ship.

But the middle class North American lifestyle is not normal. It’s the product of industrialization, consumerism, and radical inequalities. And, like the Titanic, very soon after this ship was built and we started living like this, we hit an iceberg. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring on September 27, 1962. Through the 1970s and 80s, Farley Mowat published numerous books describing how we were depleting the natural environment in Canada. 

In the early 1970s, The Club of Rome commissioned a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create computer simulations and projections of world economic and population growth based on different possible scenarios. Their findings were published in 1972 as Limits to Growth. These researchers forecasted that the outcome of the “business as usual” scenario would be that global industrial output, services, food, and population would all start declining between 2020 and 2030, and by 2100 all would have collapsed to the levels they were around 1900 — before my grandparents were born. 

Recent events and statistical analyses indicate that those projections have been accurate. The data curves they forecasted are remarkably close to what's happened from 1972 until now. Global climate change, ecological destruction, depleted resources, declining economies, forced migrations, racism, nationalism, conflict — all of these seem to be evidence that the collapse has begun.

I think we all know that it can’t continue to be business as usual anymore. But, as individuals, what do we do?

Copyright © 2019 Lynn Thorsell, All rights reserved.

References

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1962.

Meadows, DH, Meadows, DL, Randers, J, and Behrens, WW. The Limits to Growth. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Mowat, Farley

Turner, Graham, and Alexander, Cathy. Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we're nearing collapse. The Guardian, September 2, 2014.

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Malawi album on Google Photos

Please note that the views expressed here are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cuso International.