It was while reading Gwyne Dyer's Climate Wars a couple of years ago that I started to accept that, as a species, we are probably not going to avert cataclysmic forms of climate change.
As this disturbing fact has come to settle within me, it has been less a source of despair and despondency (though I do have my moments!), than a form of liberation. It has allowed me to see the world with fresh eyes.
I can see that the forms of denial of what is happening both within and around us in regards to climate change is a layered and deeply structural process. This dynamic is informed by, and in turn contributes to, the continuing, unfolding crises within the financial architecture of 'Pax Americana', the cornerstone of the United States Empire.
We are not merely living through a crisis in economic or technological control, but something much deeper, a crisis in civilisation. The foundational Greek and Hebraic imaginaries, and the deep mythical narratives that frame western civilisation, can no longer contain, inform, explain and extend, the parameters of what we experience. We are living in a crisis in storytelling.
Our relationship to our own and other species, to the past, present and future, to land, culture, science and Empire are framed and informed by many layers of stories. These have been told and retold in different guises, which at are rooted in the Greek and Hebraic imaginations.
Although there are many different cultures, in the last century the hydra-headed process known as capitalist globalisation, led in the last five decades by the US Empire, has colonised the globe. The fate of the planet is the fate of the US led imperial project known as civilisation.
If we are to understand and counter the roots of the self-destructive processes that civilisation has unleashed upon the bodies, psyches and ecosystems of the earth, then we need to become 'archeologists of memory'. We must look backwards and inwards, so uncovering, deciphering or inventing new stories that will help us deal with the enormity of what we are facing. We need new stories for a new time.
Key to this reflection is the recognition that something deep within our fractured and alienated beings is the source of this profound dis-ease. As such it is also potentially the wellspring of other, less destructive possibilities. Socrates' dictum 'know thyself' takes on a new