Living in a dying world
On learning how to inhabit (part 1)
I remember decidedly choosing social sciences to study for my future in opposition to my brother choosing to study biological sciences, being more concerned with problems that people were facing rather than helping save animals or something. Today, I spend most of my working and non-working hours thinking about the climate crisis, which, you could say, is at the intersection of people and nature.
I had never seen myself as a ‘nature person’ even when the atmosphere I grew up in could have really moulded me that way. My brother was the definition of a ‘nature person’, and we spent a lot of our holidays in forested areas. Maybe it was because I had to wake up at 6 am to accompany my brother to go birdwatching on Sundays, or that I was really pretty bad at being able to identify any species, or I just found learning the biological names of species was just impossible for my brain, I always found learning history more easy/interesting, and thought very markedly that I wanted to have a career where I could help ‘people’ which I thought was way more pressing and important than some frivolous tree/plant hugging exercise.
I got a phone when I was 16, and began to get interested in climate related issues through YouTubers making videos about the injustices in the global garment industry, which harmed workers and the environment. I then was led by algorithms into a stream of mostly European/American YouTube channels which spoke about ‘zero waste’, veganism and other lifestyle changes you could make (I feel I have to clarify here I follow very little of this anymore). When I came to university, it was a time when I got to live with people from different cultures and backgrounds than mine, and also grew to think about our systems a bit more critically, learning about privilege, exercising political rather than just consumeristic agency.
I began looking for more political ways to assert my concern for the planet and began to get into climate activism, which was initially more a copy-paste of western movements and gradually as we began to learn from older activists, we developed our own thinking, began rooting more to local social struggles, recognising that our struggles were essentially the same (although ‘climate’ by and large still remains viewed a frivolous concern by most). Environmentalism (rooted in class, gender, caste consciousness of course), I began to understand, was not just ‘gardening’ or ‘tree hugging’. I also began to orient my academics and internships in the direction of ‘urban climate’ to where I now work in this space. While I do find satisfaction with the job I do and the climate advocacy I used to engage in, there also exists a strange feeling that things could/should be different. We, whether ‘climate people’ or not, are on constant verge of burnout, nihilism or apathy. You could call this feeling a quarter-life crisis as Satya Doyle Byock does, or ‘alienation’ from living under capitalist systems as good ol’ Marx said, or ‘climate anxiety/ climate burnout/ media or news fatigue’ as we read about online.
It feels like we’re living in a dying world. The UN Secretary General warns we are entering an ‘age of chaos’, and scientists are telling us the world is warming at an unexpectedly fast rate and the UN Climate Chief tells us we have less than 2 years to solve this crisis- feels like we’re doing some kind of doomsday speed run, to the point where I just feel almost nothing when I read things like this. But I was on video call with a colleague in the US around a week ago and she was saying, “Apologies I will turn off my video because there’s actually a storm going on right now and it’s really dark” while I was here in Bangalore blistering up in the heatwave we’ve been experiencing. It feels uncanny, and I can’t help feel just a peculiar sense of alienation of living in the midst of the climate crisis, doing a job that is working towards solving it, and yet, attempting to carrying on business as usual amongst it.
I saw this tumblr post on my Instagram the other day which (and I’m paraphrasing) went:
“I wonder what other generations did while going through momentous times. Like I know and often feel like the world is falling apart - there’s wars, the planet is burning, etc but what am I doing? Laundry, barely. ”
I think overall, many of us are experiencing this kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which Medical News Today tells me is “the discomfort a person feels when their behaviour does not align with their values or beliefs”. We are all constantly aware of all that is wrong with our systems, and yet, we have to live in them- find a way to sustain ourselves, we learn skills useful to the cores of these systems, and try to find ways to be happy in the limited options it has for us. In Quarter Life, Byock talks about how our generation has learnt about how destructive previous systems were (capitalism, patriarchy etc) - so playing the scripts we’ve learned like “get a good job, get married and be a dutiful wife/husband, etc” no longer feel meaning-giving to a lot of us. To put my Humanities hat on for a second, we’re ‘post-modernists/ post-structuralists’, having rejected older systems, beliefs and values. And yet, while we’ve demolished earlier systems of meaning, most of us haven’t yet been able to forge new scripts/ structures that can make life feel meaningful.
In ‘Towards a Curriculum for ‘Belonging’’, naturalist, educator, activist (and I would consider friend), Yuvan writes about the “core problem with formal education”, it “practices a pedagogy of ‘ex-habitation’. Not inhabitation. It trains us to ‘exhabit’... to ignore the connections we have with our unique landscape and live as external entities...”. Our studies, work and living depend less and less on the actual material world that is around us. Yuvan writes, “Land then becomes a surface to make profit, not a living home to belong to or have undetachable roots in.”, but I would extend this further to ‘the self’ and our connections- they all become spaces to extract value from rather than places for us to truly inhabit, embody and bring our full life-force to. But despite our uprooted life, we still need air, water, food, shelter to live.
I’m halfway through reading the fantastic Intertidal, also by Yuvan, and the reason I picked up this book in the first place is because this line in its blurb spoke to me:
“Intertidal asks us to reimagine values to live by in the here and now, heeding the living world and attending to the climate’s calling, moving away from the old political, religious and cultural values that have proved to be ecologically disastrous”
It can be hard to really look and feel the grief of this wounded world, especially when it feels like there’s nothing you can do to help. And this is why we’ve become good at living in cognitive dissonance, but living in avoidance is not making us happy either. As the field of psychology teaches us- the only way is through. If we truly look at our world without running away or showing up only as numbed/unfeeling persons I know there will be immense grief. But I also have a sneaking suspicion that that is also where the pleasure lies.
“Until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it” Indigenous American botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
Yuvan also described redefining activism “as facilitating falling in love with the living world.”
Today, both the 'people' that I was concerned with and the 'nature' my brother was seem to be facing the same fate. So many species lost, so many ecosystems damaged, so many humans killed, their spirits tarnished, their dignity and livelihoods robbed. And yet, the tree outside my house gives me oxygen to breathe, the wounded lands around my city and state still feed me, wild plants still grow on the banks of sewage filled drains. I read the statistic “Maternal Mortality Rate of India has declined from 384 in 2000 to 103 in 2020” and I know that only took place because a bunch of people consciously and tirelessly dedicated their lives towards making it happen. My mother buys me an aloo bun every time I go home because she knows how much I love it, my friend makes sure to send me the best pictures of a celebrity she knows I find attractive. This world holds pain, but it undoubtedly also holds pleasure.
We, the children of the post-modern/post-structuralist age, have the unfortunate but potentially exciting task of building new scripts and structures to shape our worlds. I hope we can build blocks to help us feel a deeper sense of meaning, fulfilment and healing in the present and also move us towards the futures where people and nature can flourish in diversity. It can be tempting to give everything up and follow the impulsive urge to just run away and start fresh somewhere in the remote hills, but Jenny Odell in ‘How to do nothing’ reminds us of the power of staying in place, staying where you are, but just learning to refocus our attention to what matters. I’ll call this process, for me, as one of ‘learning how to inhabit’ this world, and I hope to explore and document my journey in future blog posts.