An Eaarthly Civilization

Living on Eaarth

How to cope with a changed world? seems to be the most salient question these days. Changing, sure, but changed, more to the point. People get so caught up in discussions of how quickly everything is moving that many seem not to have noticed that movement has occurred.

Climate change is an excellent example. As Bill McKibben noted in his book Eaarth, we live on a new planet, now, one with new rules on how things are gonna be. All one must do is reflect on the extremities of recent weather to realize this ain’t the climate we grew up with. For committed environmentalists such as myself, this is a hard fact to swallow.

How shall we be on planet Eaarth? I’m not interested in bullshit about shifting consciousness—we may as well just talk about the revolution of the proletariat—I want to know what real people really do.

Screw with the abstractions; let’s get concrete. I’m an urban planner, although the settings I work in could (much) more accurately be described as rural or suburban. Though I live in a city, I rarely get the pleasure of working in one. At any rate, what does it mean to be an urban planner in a suburban nation that’s presently going through an identity crisis? The grand suburban experiment has failed, but hardly anyone’s told the suburbanites, and to the extent they’ve been told they’re not listening. Yet here I am, tasked—by paying clients, no less—to help them “plan” for their future.

The only plan that makes sense for suburbia is how to get the hell out. Suburbia’s too expensive, it’s too ugly, it’s spiritually deadening, it is a huge drain on resources and labor, and has despoiled way too much of our landscape with cookie cutter bullshit and the resultant pollution. The only thing it has going for it is that it exists, but I’m inclined to think that we’re throwing good money after bad with our extraordinary efforts to keep it alive.

In this kind of circumstance, how can I give a shit about my job? How can any of us give a shit about so many of our stupid, misguided labors?