 The dominant narrative that I'm hearing today, again and again through the youth climate strikes and all this kind of stuff, is that we have to change or we're not going to survive. We've already overshot the ability of the Earth's ecosystems to support human civilization, and we better do something about that right away where we're going to have catastrophe, massive population collapse, maybe even human extinction. It's as if the crisis is going to save us from ourselves. It's as if we're going to have to change right now. We no longer have a choice. But what if we do have a choice? I began thinking about this when I read a critique by J.B. McKinnon. He's a Canadian writer of Jared Diamond's description of Easter Island and how he wove that into the overshoot and collapse narrative. So you may have heard this story, and it's not just J.B. McKinnon, there are other writers too who have questioned this. But basically the Jared Diamond version of the story is that Polynesian settlers arrived at Easter Island, I can't remember, a thousand some years ago, and built these stone monuments and exterminated all of the wildlife. They killed all of the fauna there. And by the time that they were and they had a big population boom, but then because they destroyed the ecological basis of their civilization and cut down all the trees and basically made the whole place into a barren wasteland. By the time they were discovered by Captain Cook in the 18th century, their population had dropped again all the way down to a couple thousand, and they were living a meager bear existence on rat meat, which was basically the only animal left and these gardens that they eked out amidst the volcanic rocks. And it's an object lesson for us with our monuments and using up all of our natural wealth for a temporary population surge and a temporarily grand civilization soon to collapse into bear subsistence. So anyway, there's a rewriting of this history that draws on archaeological evidence and says, actually, the population never did peak at that level. It stayed pretty constant, even though the ecology was severely disrupted, mostly because of the rats that stowed away on the canoes of the settlers, the Polynesian settlers, that destroyed the local fauna and disrupted the ecosystem and chewed the nuts of the trees and the fossilized ones that they find have gnaw marks on them from the rats and so on and so forth. And yet the people still found a way to live. They ingeniously made these gardens using, I don't know, seaweed and volcanic rock dust and stuff for fertility and they maintained their population levels to the point where when James Cook encountered them, they weren't interested in the food that he offered to trade with them. They had plenty. They were more interested in the hats that he had on the ship and they wanted to trade for those. It was only after that that the population did plummet because of the diseases that the Europeans brought. So it's a completely other retelling of the story. But in a way what it suggests is more chilling than the Jared Diamond story. It says that maybe we won't be saved from ourselves by environmental collapse. Maybe we will continue to thrive or, in all measurable ways, in terms of population, in terms of GDP, in terms of floor space per capita, in terms of BTUs expended per capita of energy, in terms of literacy. All the things that Stephen Pinker uses as evidence of our ascent and our technological triumph. Maybe these things can be continued on a world that continues to die. I call it the concrete world. Imagine a future where the entire planet has been converted essentially into one big strip mine and waste dump. Where the dying of the trees continues. The dying of the whales, of the fish, of one species after another after another, of one ecosystem of the insects. This huge drop-off in insect population that you may have noticed. It's not your imagination that there's less bug splatter on the window than when you were a kid. My father said, yeah, there used to be clouds of insects. We have to turn on our windshield wipers sometimes driving at night. This depletion of life J.B. McKinnon calls it a 10% world. And there's other books too that bring up these accounts from the first Europeans to come to North America of just how abundant life was. You know, we look out today and if we see a pod of whales, that's pretty exciting. But there are accounts of looking out and seeing thousands of whales whose spume filled the air with mist. Of oysters afoot across in the Chesapeake Bay. Of going fishing by putting a bear hook and you catch a fish in seconds. Like scooping your hat in there and you have a meal. Like that amount of wealth of horses going through the brush and their bellies stained with the berries. So a 10% world. And what if a 10% world becomes a 1% world in another few hundred years? And we continue to survive on a concrete world. Substituting for all that's lost with technological substitutes. Making oxygen maybe with vats of algae or something like that. Drawing down the carbon to maintain atmospheric equilibrium with machines. In closing our cities in bubbles. I mean we're already kind of doing that everybody's house is climate controlled and getting air filters and stuff like that and water filters. Like what if we could survive in a totally poisoned world? If we have the right filters. If we have the hydroponic factories to make the food. Or vat grown meat. And maybe we just leave earth behind and go off into space. What if we could do that? What's going to stop us? This is a more important question. What's going to stop us from doing that? Because in fact we have been walking down that path for a very long time. What's going to stop us from taking another step and another step and another step down that path? Now I'm not saying that we could do that. That we could become independent of the ecology. But so far we've been doing a pretty good job of it. Population, longevity, GDP, literacy. All these things have stayed steady or increased even as life has declined. So our experience up until now says maybe we could do it. So the question is do we want to? And maybe we need to replace the rhetoric of we better change or we're not going to survive. Because what if that's not true? And what if people sense that that's not true? And they don't really believe it. I mean, you can read all the science you want. You can read about the methane feedback loop all you want. But do you really believe that we're going to be extinct in 20 years? Most people do not really believe it. If they really believed it for real, they wouldn't be acting the way that they do now. So the important question then is not what do we need to do to survive? The important question, I think the question we need to be asking, not how will we survive? But what world do we want to live in? To recognize the power of our choices, the power of our stories, the power of the story of the world is alive. If we hold that story, we invite the world to be more and more alive. If we hold the story of the world is this dead thing, a source of resources, a dump for our wastes. We hold that story of world is dead. We create a world that is dead. Our stories are our most powerful creative tool. They are what organize people, what bring our labor and our creativity into coherence toward a goal. They tell us, our stories tell us who we are and why we are here. There are things that we need to do on earth right now that only make sense if they're part of a mass movement to do those things. They only make sense if we understand ourselves collectively as why we are here right now is to contribute to the healing of this earth. And then you know you're not alone. You know that it's not fruitless. You know that you're doing your part. So this coherence comes from a collective choice, a collective intention to create a more beautiful world. It comes from the question, what world do we want to live in? A living world or a dead world? Do we want the concrete world where nature is dead but it's okay because we have VR that with content rich experiences and high resolution digital displays of those nature scenes. Is that what we want? Maybe we can make it. Maybe we can do that. Do we want to do that? This is the question. Who are we? Why are we here? What world do we want to create? I think that both futures are possible. I can see them. I can see the concrete world scarred and ruined. And I can see a more beautiful world, a flourishing world where the deserts are greening and the species are coming back and the oceans are full of fish and flocks of birds cover the sky. I can see that world and humans living peacefully on it. You can feel it too. That world exists. Which one are we going to experience in our future? Which one are our great, great, great, great, great grandchildren going to live in? That depends on which one we summon. I won't even say that we create it. That's not quite the right word. It's how we come into alignment with that future. It's as if many possible worlds exist already in a quantum superposition of timelines. And the timeline that we orient toward through our choices, that's the one that we walk. That's the one that we arrive at eventually. And that means that every choice that we make individually and collectively is a kind of a prayer that aligns us with a certain reality and a certain future. It's a declaration of here is who I want to be. Here is the world I want to live in. We may not understand on a pragmatic level how that choice is actually going to change things. How taking care of that puppy is going to bring about a more beautiful world, for example. But if that choice is a choice for life, a choice for love, a choice to act on what calls to our care, then it is an aligning action with that beautiful world, that healed world that we can sense is possible. I would like for the conversation to turn away from can we survive? How will we survive? That's not the goal of life. The goal of life is not to survive it. On a personal level, that's not the goal of life. It's not to make it to your deathbed intact. The goal of life is to create something beautiful, meaningful, to give your gifts and service to something much bigger than ourselves. You can feel that. When you're in that, you feel alive. You feel like, yeah, this is what I'm here to do. You feel fully alive when you're in service to something that is beautiful to you, meaningful to you, that engages you. And collectively, we are the same way. We're not here to survive this. We're here to contribute. We were created by Earth to contribute. We're not an accident. There's an evolutionary purpose that resides in the gifts that we've used to make such a mess. And when we ask, why are we here? And what world do we want to live in? We reorient those gifts toward that world, toward that purpose. And any other application of those gifts becomes intolerable. And it's so much more empowering to say, what world do we choose rather than how do we make it? How do we survive? That's the mindset that's gotten us into trouble. How do we make sure that human humanity makes it? Seeing the world as an instrument of some narrow conception of human well-being, which in this day and age is translated into more and more stuff. When human well-being is denominated in terms of money or other measurables, it leaves out the bigger picture. It leaves out what larger thing that we could be part of. And it also leaves out what actually constitutes human well-being. These things that we can measure are in large part compensations for what makes people happy. There's a limit to how much we can eat, a limit to how much we can grow. And we're still kind of caught in the growth phase. But growth is supposed to end. And another kind of development begins with the end of growth. That other kind of development is growing into our adulthood, our maturation, which is identical to saying or to following the question, why am I here? It happens with adolescents, too. The young man or the young woman wants to know why they're here. It's not good enough just to make a living and to survive. The purpose of the ecological crisis will only be fulfilled when it has brought us to ask those questions. Until then, it will not go away. We will make no progress. And the earth will spiral closer and closer toward the concrete world. It's only when we embrace our participation in life and understand that life exists for the purpose of life to make the universe more and more alive. Only then will we make the earth more and more alive, because that's why we're here.