Green vs. "Green", and exposing the messiness of it all.
A few responded to “Earth needs therapy, not ‘green’ tech nor ‘green’ finance” and asked why the either-or framing. My answer lies in differentiating “green” from green. With the added quotes, “green” referred to specific technologies and the financialization of all parts of Earth propped up as sustainability solutions—when in practice, they have and/or likely will cause more harm than aid in healing.
In other words, I was not saying that no changes needed to be made to the financial system or that no technologies will help. We do need innovations that support restoration, and we do need to re-align the economy with ecology.
But these sorts of changes, in support of regeneration, are necessarily born out of a deepened awareness of and intimacy with every ecoregion—each with differing traits, cultures, and cycles waiting for us to re-embody.
As the Aboriginal scholar and member of the Apalech Clan Tyson Yunkaporta shared with me in “A different kind of growth”:
“The only way it'll work is if we have diversity and each bioregion responding to the unique spirit and entities of place—to build a patterning of relation and an economy, a governance structure, there, and then syndicating that out with all the other bioregions around.
You have to have that syndicated diversity and balance and that constant tension and balance between autonomy and collectivity, which is tricky. But it's doable and scalable. And the only way for it to be scalable is to be syndicated. It's not scalable if it's monolithic, which I think is what most people mean when they say scale, now.”
One-size-fits-all, supremacist visions of sustainability are often upheld by a similar colonial logic that destroyed biocultural diversity in the first place. To really regenerate the diversity that lends itself to collective resilience and climate stabilization, solutions cannot be replicated at scale. They can only be syndicated, though first rooted in a deep knowing of and relation to place.
So we return to my invitation to better understand the roots of our multifaceted crises using a relational lens.
Explore and expose the tension.
The topic of “renewable” energy, as I've come to see, is a contentious one, especially between those who hold the values of deep ecology—who ache at the thought of living landscapes being blown up for lithium mines just as much as the ones destroyed for coal—and those who believe we can create technofixes to allow the opulence of the “developed” world and the top 1% to continue. It's not a clear-cut boundary, of course, with many who recognize the nuance and are willing to ask themselves the difficult questions.
But it's not helpful to suppress discourses on such complexities to pretend that there is already a unity to preserve—when in fact, some people's ideas on what the solutions are actually work against other people's wellbeing and visions of healing. That is a major part of the problem itself.
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