Manifesting Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis
“You’re seeing a traffic jam, I’m seeing an abundance of cars”. I don’t normally pay much attention to billboards, but this one got me hooked. There’s no further elaboration on what the author could have meant by this, or any hint at what products she’s selling. All you can see is just this quote, her name, and photos of her in a golden dress.
We do have an abundance of cars, now that I think about it. In my lifetime alone, the number of automobiles in our country has quintupled. They’ve gone from a luxury most families couldn’t afford to something owned by pretty much anybody. For better or worse, cars are a much larger part of our lives than when I was a kid.
Some people think it’s definitely for the worse
Last month two young activists poured orange paint all over the Warsaw Mermaid, a sandstone monument in the heart of our city. My parents were surprised when I told them similar protests have been happening all over the world for a while, and would not even spare the famous Mona Lisa. Compared with bold requests of their international counterparts such as “Just Stop Oil”, the Polish protesters are asking quite modestly that our government stops building new highways and invest all that money in public transport instead. Cars are killing the world, they say, and we’re the last generation that can do something about it.
I can totally see where they’re coming from with this. Despite unusual weather events happening all around the world and climate scientists issuing ever more dire warnings, life and business seem to be going as usual in every other respect. For young people who worry about their future, viral protests that raise awareness of the problem can certainly seem like the most accessible course of action.
I’ll always have a sweet spot in my heart for people who deeply care about something, and these activists certainly do care. I’m just not sure if acting out on famous cultural symbols is going to win them support. My parents, as far as I can tell, are still pretty disgusted by this.
So which one is it, abundance or a crisis?
In my experience so far, it’s definitely been abundance. All my life I’ve only experienced everything getting better, more opportunities opening up, and people around me being able to afford things they’d never have thought they could have just a few years before.
My parents still believe the only way to get ahead in life is at the cost of someone else, as they spent their formative years in a system where the government controlled every job and entrepreneurship was forbidden. Young people entering adulthood right now have to deal with all sorts of problems that weren’t present back in my day. I grew up during the sweet spot in between, when international companies coming to our country competed for every reasonably bright person with decent English, and you could easily build a great life up from there.
I must say I was pretty lucky even for my generation, but getting lucky a few decades earlier or later must have been much harder than this. I am a child of abundance, I have done nothing to deserve it, and I know it’s quite an unusual thing even in the twentieth century, let alone any of the numerous ones before it.
“Whatever is happening, it is so that all of your dreams come true”
At least that’s what the billboard lady says on her website. For just 450 US dollars she will teach you how to manifest abundance in your life over the course of 8 zoom calls and one in-person workshop. Courses like this seem quite abundant (lol) in the US, but here in Poland the gospel of abundance is still pretty unheard of outside of spiritual woo circles. It takes a certain kind of a person to even entertain the idea that “there are no limits to what you can achieve in life”, or “you are the one who’s creating your whole reality”. I’m coming to realize this kind of a person is pretty much me.
If I could travel back in time a few hundred years, could I explain any of this stuff to my ancestors? As far as I can tell, peasant life was pretty much zero-sum. There’s only so much land for everyone to grow all the food their families would need for the whole year, and all the feed for the animals who did all the heavy lifting, and all the wood they would need to cook or heat their homes (let alone build new ones). Even if the landlords didn’t take away a large chunk of everything like they did, there would still be little for everyone else to share, and no tools that would allow the next year to bring more. And this is still the good case scenario that doesn’t involve war, contagious illnesses, or famines. Try manifesting your abundant limitless reality in the middle of that.
Until very recently, people were at mercy of physics and biology, and painfully aware of the limits imposed by these on their lives. Is our age of abundance just a short blip in time after which we’ll revert to struggling for survival? I might have an idea what the lady in the golden dress would reply to this.
Fossil fuels bent the limits of physics to our advantage
You can grow much more food when you don’t have to pick it all up manually. You can make much more clothes, furniture, or all other sorts of stuff, when it’s heavy machines doing all the hard work. And you can sell it all to people much further away when there are mechanical horses that can move heavy things super fast without ever needing to take a break.
If there are cheat codes in life, fossil fuels are the biggest one in at least the last few thousand years. Even the most passionate climate activists would not rather go back to life before them. Can I blame my ancestors for choosing the best possible life for their children, when after centuries of hardship and toil they were finally given a choice?
It does make me wonder though if at some point we’ll have to pay for all that cheating. Young people around me believe that this is already the case, but nothing in my experience so far has been bad enough to drive the point home.
Shouldn’t things like these sort themselves out naturally?
It might sound like magical thinking, but I saw this happening with cruelty-free eggs. When I was a kid, factory-farmed meat and eggs were all you could buy, and they were still a major position in everyone’s budget. Most people knew the chickens were treated in a horrible way, but given the choice between chicken welfare and their children getting enough protein they didn’t think much about it. With time, eggs got cheaper relative to how much people earned, and some more humane options slowly showed up in the stores.
Right now most people around me only eat free-range eggs, which you can easily get pretty much everywhere. You can also buy pasta or mayo that’s only made with those, and free-range chicken meat is becoming more available and affordable too. If this could happen with chickens, why wouldn’t it be the case for beef and pork, passive houses, electric cars, or net-zero cities? Just give us enough time to develop more effective eco-friendly ways to do stuff and build up wealth, and at some point people will naturally choose the right thing.
I guess that’s what baby boomers in the US must have thought when it comes to the climate or their children’s future. If everything so far has only been getting better, surely their lives will be even more awesome still? In some ways I am much more like American boomers than like their children, who often blame them for not leaving a better world to live in. Will my children blame me too when they grow up? Unlike the boomers, I have plenty of evidence that good vibes and positive thinking might not always be enough.
Crisis? Why focus on a crisis?
When Russia attacked Ukraine a while ago, everyone around me was understandably distraught. Everyone except for some highly spiritual people passionate about manifesting, who would say stuff like “War? If you focus your precious energy on a war, that’s what you’re gonna get. There’s no point dwelling in negativity, just do your own thing and trust that the Universe will take care of everything else as soon as the time is right.”
Is this how I sound like to people younger than me who are distressed about the climate? I’ve mentioned here many times that growing up is the most important thing we can do if we care about our children’s future. And yet in practice all this spiritual inner transformation rarely ends up in someone quitting their job to work on reforestation, building a solar grid, or desalinating water. Usually they end up as yet another writer, yoga teacher or life coach. No offence to any writers, yoga teachers, or life coaches around here, I’ve personally had aspirations to become at least two of those. But if we all did that, there would be no one left to run the abundance infrastructure we already have, let alone upgrade it for the challenges of the 21st century. If that’s how growing up looks like, this certainly isn’t enough.
Surely there’s someone smarter than me who will know what to do
You can’t expect the spiritual crowd to work on hard engineering problems, but there are people who are naturally talented in this area and take deep pleasure in solving such things. Maybe I can focus on what I know best and trust that the natural born engineers will do what is needed? So far the biggest breakthroughs in everyone’s quality of life came through some sort of new technology, brought about by brilliant people working together in small groups. Who knows, maybe we are just a few genius inventions away from living abundant lives forever without ever having to worry about the climate again.
Well, unless these brilliant people would rather get a job at one of the giant tech companies, or work remotely for just a few hours per day and travel the world. Environmental problems require confronting the limitations of atoms, biological organisms, and policy, all of which are a mess compared with computer code. They also don’t pay nearly as much as Facebook or Google would do. Can I expect anyone to voluntarily make their lives much harder if that’s not a choice I’m willing to make myself?
Or maybe we should stick to what the politicians say
At least in the EU, they seem to have a plan. But the widespread farmers’ protests all over the continent show that having a plan is not the same thing as putting it into practice. It might sounds smart on paper, but is it actually workable in the messy world? The farmers don’t seem to believe so, and they may have good reasons for their strong objections. They are the ones with actual experience of dealing with dirt, organisms, and atoms after all.
But who am I to say? I have neither grown food nor experienced how it’s like to design a large-scale environmental policy, and what kinds of evidence, considerations, and tradeoffs must be taken into account when crafting one. Having a plan, even a bad one that you can iterate upon later, might still be a better option than riding the waves of positive thinking straight into a catastrophe.
So what options do we have?
Keep working on my thing and trusting that the Universe will take care of the rest, or pour paint and soup over great works of art? The latter might give me some peace of mind that at least I’m doing something, but it’s hard for me to tell if it’s any more effective than the first.
I only know a bunch of people who are doing anything beyond these two options, either despairing about the climate, or trusting that it will all work out without their active involvement. They are either experimenting with permaculture, restoring native ecosystems, or running startups that build carbon capture technologies. If anything ever moves forward, it will be thanks to heroes like these.
But as much as I admire every single one of them, I must confess I would still rather become a yoga teacher than run even the most eco farm. My gut still says I could make most impact by doing what comes to me naturally, but I don’t know how much of this is me looking for an easy way out. Maybe I will change my mind if my family’s quality of life suffers. Maybe it still won’t be too late at that point. At least if my children ask me one day what the hell I was thinking when I didn’t do more personally, I will have this essay to show them.
For now, I have much more questions than answers, and a barely noticeable feeling that maybe I should care more about it. Have you felt in a similar way too? I know there’s a bunch of smart and thoughtful people around here who aren’t directly working on climate solutions, and I’d love to hear from you all how you’re grappling with questions like these.