It Was Never About the Recycling Bins
Do Nothing for the Planet: Part One
The Earth’s resources are depleting at an alarming rate. So much so that our future as a species is uncertain. And yet, despite the warnings, the campaigns and an ever-increasing assortment of recycling bins, we aren’t reaching our targets or making any real progress in reducing the damage.
Why?
I think the answer lies in our consciousness.
The 1964 children’s book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein imparts some serious wisdom in true children’s-book fashion. It follows a boy and his friendship with a tree. When the boy is young, the tree is a source of simple pleasure. But as the two grow, the relationship transforms: the boy’s motives change with adult life, and the tree, who loves him, gives him whatever he wants. The apples he once enjoyed eating, he takes to sell. The branches he once enjoyed for their own sake, he takes for wood. Eventually all that is left is her trunk, which he takes too, until she herself is left with nothing. The relationship that was once beautiful and simple has become something destructive. Years pass; the boy is now an old man who no longer wants to take. He returns to the tree, now a stump, and simply sits, and rests.
The book has been banned from some libraries in Colorado for its depiction of sexism. That is not the message I’m taking from it. To me it is a powerful metaphor for our impact on the earth, and a valuable insight into perspective. There is something compelling about the boy’s blind self-interest, something that, with a little introspection, we might see mirrored in our own lives.
The pioneering psychiatrist Stanislav Grof suggested that the crisis the Earth is facing is a problem of consciousness, not climate. This is not as left-field as it sounds. When you examine the wisdom traditions and the psychological schools side by side, they observe strikingly similar models of ascending consciousness, and a broadly shared idea that developing one’s own consciousness leads to a less materially inclined mind.
We don’t understand consciousness. But we can’t deny its presence, and some of the claims made for its reach are, at the very least, provocative.¹ Roger Nelson, a psychologist known for his work at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, once went to investigate a claim made by the Transcendental Meditation teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the man who brought enlightenment to The Beatles, among others. Maharishi made some hefty promises about his particular flavour of meditation. (For the unfamiliar, T.M. induces a meditative state through the repetition of a personally chosen mantra) His claim was that during a mass meditation event, the “energy” emitted lowered crime rates in the surrounding area. Every year, some 8,000 meditators gather at Maharishi’s university in Iowa for an event called Super Radiance; the research associated with it reported that crime fell by around 24% in surrounding areas afterwards.¹
Now, I would looooove if this idea compelled enough people to create some reverberating tipping point where the planet and civilisation were saved overnight. But since enlightenment hasn’t exactly gone viral, it would be a little naive of me to suggest that’s about to happen. What I’ll say instead is more modest, and I think more useful: a shift in the way we think may simply give people the space to consider whether our societal habits are necessary, and, arguably more importantly, whether they actually make us happy.
Because the suggestion that the answer to our planet’s survival lies within ourselves makes most people uneasy. It’s much more comfortable to keep the problem out there: in policy, in technology, in someone else’s supply chain. And our solutions tend to arrive wrapped in their own tailor-made excuses, usually something about maintaining consistency and stability in the economy. The Covid-19 pandemic rather exposed that alibi: when we decided a threat was urgent enough, the “impossible” changes happened almost overnight.
Here is the part I find most telling. Almost every climate solution we’re offered is packaged as a sacrifice: a giving-up, a going-without, a punishment for the crime of being alive at the wrong time. And it’s no coincidence that the countries producing and consuming most in pursuit of “success” are the biggest contributors to the crisis, while the countries organised around happiness, community and spiritual growth stand to be its first victims, having contributed almost nothing to it.
But sacrifice, in any capacity, is doomed to fail. Service performed from a place of duty and self-denial rarely lasts. Service that comes from a genuine, reciprocal relationship, one that meets our real needs and appeals to our most authentic self, could be truly transformative.
Which raises the obvious question, and the subject of the next part: how on earth do we build a reciprocal relationship with a planet?
Notes
A note on the Maharishi Effect. I want to be honest about this one, because I love it and I don’t fully trust it in equal measure. The “Super Radiance” and one-percent studies are frequently cited in consciousness circles, but they’re contested for good reasons: much of the research was conducted or funded by organisations connected to the TM movement itself, the studies have been criticised on methodology (how “surrounding crime” was defined, what was controlled for, publication bias), and the headline results have not been independently and robustly replicated. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, which studied consciousness and “anomalous” effects for nearly three decades, closed in 2007, and its findings were never widely reproduced by independent labs. So: file this under fascinating and unproven. I include it not as settled science but as a provocation, a claim interesting enough to sit with, even while we hold it lightly. Personally, I choose to believe this is correct, but it’s important blindly accept it as, blind faith often leads to severe disappointment later.