10 blind men and a dying planet.
When you’re writing a hefty book on a weighty topic over the course of ten years and multiple editors, a lot of dross ends up on the cutting room floor. A lot of dross, and some good stuff, too. Here’s one of the best bits that didn’t make it into the book. It’s a (very stretched) version of the parable of the ten blind men (us and our many POVs) and the elephant (climate catastrophe). The writing here depicts some of the starker - and darker - aspects of humanity’s challenge in grasping the enormity of the climate/meta/poly-crisis we’ve plunged ourselves into. Oh, and it’s funny at times, too.
Centered around the key question, “what are we in a crisis of?”, this piece pinpoints a specific moment in the emotional and spiritual journey “I Want a Better Catastrophe” offers readers. Fans of the flowchart will recognize many connections. Hope it’s useful to you, and look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Ten blind men and a dying planet.
There’s an ancient and well-known Indian parable in which a mysterious creature wanders into a village and ten blind men try to ascertain its nature. Each man places his hands on a different part of the elephant — ear, flank, tusk — and taking their part for the whole — it’s a flower! it’s a wall! it’s a spear! — fall to arguing.
In our modern world, this parable arrives with a ferocious irony, as elephants — creatures so miraculous they were once worthy of a parable for the unknowability of God — are being run off their land and murdered to near extinction, their tusks ripped from their faces, their feet turned into ashtrays and trophy stools. And so, in our parable, the elephant is also wounded, sick, terrorized, dying. And just as the men are curiously examining it, it goes into a death spasm, keeling over on top of them, trapping all underneath its massive weight, as any proper allegory for our ecological crisis should.
The blind men cry out, no longer just curious but desperate now to understand the nature of this beast. Not just what is it, but why is it dying? And crucially: Is there any way to help it revive? For, unless it finds its strength again, unless it gets back up on its feet, every one of us blind humans will also perish.
The first blind man, though pinned to the ground, is still able to wriggle one arm free and feel around. He finds the beast’s mouth; he feels the contours of its decaying teeth and emaciated jowls. “The creature is starving!” he cries out. “And soon, so will we! Extreme heat is blasting our fields. In the last 150 years, we’ve lost 50% of our topsoil. In a few short decades we will have 10 billion mouths to feed on this world, while topsoil is being degraded at an alarming rate. We are in a worldwide food crisis, and we must take immediate action!
There’s a murmur of concern among the other blind men.
“Well, what do you propose?!” stammers one.
“Our farmers can transition to regenerative agriculture,” says the first blind man.
“Yes,” chimes in another, “I hear it not only preserves the topsoil, but is cheaper to operate and has higher yields.”
“And, like me,” says another, pridefully placing his hand over his heart, “we must all adopt a plant-based diet.”
“Don’t get holier-than-thou, holy man!” shouts another. (And indeed he was a Sadhu who’d taken a strict vow of vegetarianism. Though it obviously wasn’t everyone’s cup of chai.)
“In any case, we must do whatever it takes,” cries the first blind man, “after all, what could be more important than the food we eat?!”
“The water we drink!” cries a second blind man. For he is caught under what feels like a huge hose. One nostril of this hose is bone dry, the other a gushing flood. “The creature is both drowning and dying of drought!” cries out this second blind man. “And no wonder: our warming atmosphere and oceans are disrupting our entire hydrological cycle. There’s extreme droughts in California; toxic floods in Texas; undrinkable water in Michigan.” (This blind man had evidently traveled extensively in North America and knew the region well.) “And as more and more aquifers are privatized and poisoned, battles are raging across the land to protect what’s left. ‘Water is life’ say the Ogoni Sioux. And they are right. We cannot live without water; nothing can live without water. First and foremost, this is a crisis of water.”
The third blind man, crushed under the beast’s immense chest, can do nothing but cup his ear and listen. He hears a heart beating, but it beats arrhythmically; he hears lungs breathing but the breaths are short and clotted. “The beast is sick, and has been for a long time,” cries this third blind man. “There is asthma in the cities (150K deaths per year); heat exhaustion during spikes, viruses traveling north. Public health systems already favoring the rich and hollowed out by austerity measures are being overwhelmed by natural disasters and new pandemic-level events. We must declare a global health emergency! For, without our health, we have nothing.”
“A giant flower is pressing down upon me,” cries the fourth blind man, for he is pinned under the creature’s ears. “But where are the bees that should be buzzing about it? Where are all the insects that would normally be here? Where are the birds? We are driving these keystone pollinators from the world.”
“And without pollinators today, no food tomorrow,” chimes in the first blind man, who is still on his it’s-a-food-crisis tip.
“The UN,” continues the fourth blind man, “estimates that 1 million species are under threat of extinction in the next decades. Through a toxic combination of Global Warming, deforestation, poaching, habitat encroachment, pesticides, and overfishing, we are emptying the world of life. It’s not just ‘happening.’ We are doing it. A single corn kernel coated in neonicotinoid pesticides can kill a bird, and still the EPA refuses to classify it as dangerous. This is not a crisis of food, or water, or health; it’s a crisis of biodiversity. A Sixth Great Extinction. A heinous act of ecocide perpetrated by one species (us) upon all the others, that will soon double-back upon us just like this besieged elephantine creature, here, who is crushing all of us in her death throes.”
“What can we do?!” wail the many blind men. “What can we do?!”
“A lot!” cries the fourth blind man. “Ban neonic pesticides; set aside half the planet as ‘wild;’ help nature heal itself by restoring the world’s wetlands and forests. It’s a lot to do, but it’s all possible. And we must do it before it’s too late.”
The fifth blind man is trapped under the beast’s massive foot. He feels around as best he can. It’s worn and calloused and full of splinters. “This creature,” cries the fifth blind man, “has traveled a long, long way. She is far from home, and can not return. She is not just sick, but homesick. And so are we. We’re in a crisis of dislocation, refugees and forced migration,” he cries. “Millions cannot return to their parched farmlands in Honduras, their drowning islands in the South Pacific, their Syrian hometowns riven by civil war and failed harvests. Just as millions more will be forced to flee the great cities of Miami, New Orleans, and Boston, when later this century they are inundated by rising seas.” (He, too, had traveled widely in North America and knew the situation.) “By 2050, the UN expects over 200 million1 climate refugees worldwide. And even though us folks in the rich countries caused this humanitarian crisis — through our many decades of carbon profligacy — instead of offering help and shelter, we militarize2 our borders and turn away thousands and soon millions to drown and die. Can we not find it in our hearts and in our homes to give refuge to our suffering brothers and sisters?”
The sixth blind man, trapped under the vast wall of the creature’s flank, can barely breathe. He feels along this vast hide, its skin hard and leathery and cracked with age. And even though he’s blind, he’s not color-blind, and he cries out, “Would our borders be so harshly policed if most of the people my blind colleague just spoke of were white-skinned? I think not. Even I, a blind man, know this. Racial profiling by ICE agents is widespread; and environmental racism is no accident. Poor neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color are the most vulnerable to climate disruption and black Americans are three times3 more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts. Which is why the leadership of frontline communities is crucial, and why I have a ‘Black Lives Matter’ sign up in my tea-shop.
There is a smattering of applause, cut short by a muffled cry from the seventh blind man. Muffled because he is being inadvertently tea-bagged at scale, crushed smack dab between the beast’s two testicles of unusual size.
One is hypertrophied, misshapen, and hard — not hard like a ball of steel, hard like a puckered ball of calcified cysts. The other is tiny, soft, pulled meekly up into its sac. “If my two hands do not lie,” says the blind man haltingly, “I believe our ecological crisis is also a crisis of masculinity.”
“Wait, wha?” Say the others, who, being men, and in spite of their current dire circumstances, still imagine themselves powerful beyond measure. “I can see how we’re caught in a crisis of food, water, and health,” says one. “I can even accept,” says a second, “that our crisis is one of immigration and even of race.” “But,” says a third, “masculinity?”
“My hands do not lie,” the blind man assures them.
“Women run countries and companies,” says a fourth. “They fly in planes; they, too, throw away plastic. How is this the fault of men alone?”
“Along with weakness, childhood and helplessness, what does industrial civilization fear and hate the most?”
The others are not sure, and say nothing.
“Femininity!” says the blind man. “Or so argues collapse psychologist Jamey Hecht who flags the patriarchal drive for order, security, certainty and control, as a key driver of our coming ecological collapse.”
“Oh, does he now?,” mocks a fifth.
“Men,” the blind man continues, still muffled but unfazed, “would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered.” (This blind man is evidently quite well read, as he’s now quoting frequent NY Times contributor Pankaj Mishra.)
“And what do you propose we do about this, blind man, trapped as you are under a pair of misshapen balls?
“I suggest we take all our ‘what does it mean to be a man these days…?’ angst and put it to work undoing the damage our quest for domination has done to the planet and our own psyches.”
And as if in proof of the difficulties of carrying out such a mission, the discussion is suddenly interrupted by the simultaneous cries of yet three more blind men (born not just blind but as conjoined triplets), now pinned prostrate by the very belly of the beast. The creature’s anus hovers just above them, and from it sizable clumps of waste fall onto their triple-heads. In unison, they shout: “It’s a crisis of crbncptlsmcvlztn!”
“A crisis of what?!” shout back all the other blind men, straining to make out this new explanation.
“Carbon!” shouts the first head, finally, managing to raise his voice above his other heads.
“No, it isn’t!” shouts his other two heads.
“What’s all this shit landing on our three heads right now, then?!”
“Oh, it’s carbon,” says the second head. “But atmosphere-poisoning levels of carbon are just a symptom of a larger system that treats the environment (as well as our own health and wellbeing) as an expendable externality in its insatiable quest for corporate profits at all costs! It’s not a crisis of carbon; it’s a crisis of capitalism!”
“What are you talking about?!” says the third head. “The Soviet Union was a huge polluter; it treated Nature as a godless raw material to be shaped for the greater glory of the State. What’s crushing us here, what’s shitting into my face right now, is way bigger than carbon, way bigger than even capitalism; it’s industrial civilization itself!”
They argue loudly and bitterly. (And you probably would too if all three of your heads were being sat on and shat on by a death-spasming creature of pan-dimensional complexity.)
And at that, all hell breaks loose. Everyone shouting out their own theory at the same time, including some blind men who hadn’t spoken up yet (the village was evidently full of them). One, clearly influenced by Paul Kingsnorth, argues passionately that our crisis is a crisis of stories. (“Our cultural software is malfunctioning,” this one says; “we tell ourselves lies and fantasies — that we can control the planet, that we are ‘above’ other beings, that we deserve infinite growth on a finite planet — but these were never true and are now wreaking havoc upon us and our world; we must find ourselves better stories to live in.”)
Another has evidently been reading a lot of poet-farmer Wendell Berry, because he quickly goes off on a rant about how “our ecological crisis is a crisis of character.” (“The challenge before each of us,” he insists “is ultimately a personal and moral one: how to take right action once we recognize the inescapably destructive nature of our society.”)
Yet another claims we were suffering a crisis of imagination. (“It is easier for us to imagine the end of the world, than the end of capitalism;” he says, and then poses a curious question that not everyone in the village understands: “Can our Afro-Indigenous-Trans-Eco-Socialist Futurism beat up their Capitalist Realism?”).
Yet another blind man, this one sporting a long druid-like beard which clearly tips him off as a John Michael Greer fanboy, also gets into the mix, wondering aloud whether we weren’t actually in “a crisis of reality itself” and whether the challenge before us was to “return to reality,” to a world that our ancestors would recognize, not of problems, but of unsolvable predicaments, some of which, evidently, might fall on us and try to crush the life out of us.
“Hush, all of you!” shouts the tenth blind man at last. “Yes, it is all of that, yet more, so much more. Just slow down for a moment. Quiet your left-brain chatter. Stop parsing, stop dividing. It’s not just about us humans. It’s not just about what we can name or count. Stop and listen. Feel. Open your heart. The Earth is alive. The Universe is alive; it is ‘a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.’ We have lost this understanding, and we must somehow regain it. Our crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis, a ‘crisis of Being.’ We are suffering — mortally — from separation, alienation and lost connection; we must reenchant our relationship to the universe, we must re-awaken to our interconnectedness.”
“This creature who is currently crushing the life out of us through no fault of her own, is not only sentient but soulful; she is sensitive in ways we cannot even imagine. One of you referred to this trunkish snout I am now pressed up against as a ‘hose.’ Yes, I suppose it is that — a hose capable of sucking up 10 gallons of water a minute — but it is so much more4. It is also her upper lip, her nose (with a sense of smell more capable than a bloodhound’s), and a mighty tongue-like muscle (comprising 150,000 muscle bundles in all) so strong that with it she can push down trees and lift a car out of a ditch, yet with fingers at its tip so dextrous she can pick up a single blade of grass or hold a paintbrush. With her trunk in the air, she can sense far-off thunder; when touching the ground, the rumble of faraway herds. With this miraculous trunk she not only picks up these fine vibrations; not only breathes, smells, showers, forages, and snorkels; but greets and caresses her loved ones, sometimes wrapping her trunk around her calf’s belly, or — if she herself is feeling uneasy — touching her own face in a self-soothing gesture.”
“And what are we doing to these magnificent, intelligent, sensitive creatures? Murdering them to extinction for footstools and sex potions. If we continue in our ways, one day they could all be gone7. How is it possible for us to do this? It is because we have lost our way. We have forgotten that what we do to them, we do to ourselves. Which is exactly why we are all trapped here now, underneath this magnificent dying creature. And why our crisis is fundamentally spiritual, and why we will only solve it, first and foremost, by a revolution in our hearts.”
And, at this, a hush falls over all the blind men, and over all the rest of the village.
Total number of climate refugees is hard to estimate. According to the UN University:
Currently, forecasts vary from 25 million to 1 billion environmental migrants by 2050, moving either within their countries or across borders, on a permanent or temporary basis, with 200 million being the most widely cited estimate, according to a 2015 study carried out by the Institute for Environment and Human Security of the United Nations University.
To better understand the difficulty of reliable numbers (as well as whether the proper term is indeed “climate refugees”), see:
https://grist.org/article/climate-refugee-number-definition/
and