Locus of Control

The world is really heavy right now.

I’ve known for some time that the mode of operations that humans have embarked on for a few hundred years has been really rough on the natural world. I’ve known since before I had words to put to it. There are many people who still argue, even though climate chaos is becoming more and more apparent, that humans aren’t a problem and that the climate of earth isn’t static but has changed throughout geologic history. They aren’t wrong, necessarily, but those people can’t see the complexity in the problem. They can’t see that the drought and the flood and the fire are all one in the same.

There is little doubt that things are changing. The evidence is beginning to press down upon communities in the US where we have had, and in some ways still have, a type of insulation of affluence from the impacts of climate extremes. We’re a big enough landmass that many of the natural disasters that befall our fellow citizens never reach the bulk of the population, and most definitely they never effect all of us at once. Those of us paying attention though, we feel it. Those of us who have been immersed in permaculture for a while know that this late in the game, although we could have invested in jobs revolving around restoration of ecology for the past 60 years as a matter of national security, our collective actions will now have to be based on cleaning up the mess and hoping that regulatory bodies get out of the way for rebuilding communities that can withstand the bulk of the potential force of an unstable climate. We know there are solutions, they are community scale solutions, for creating resilience. We are seeing them work in places that have been desertified for so long that the people living in those places can’t remember when the landscape wasn’t a barren wasteland, when they accidentally stopped the rain. Those solutions are widely adaptable and highly effective, but here it’s business as usual. We are screaming the solutions. We feel like they are falling on deaf ears. I feel like they are falling on deaf ears.

No doubt we’ve made mistakes. Unlimited growth as a goal for humanity has not been kind to planetary systems. We have managed to disturb every cycle on the globe from the water cycle, to the salt cycle…yep, there’s a salt cycle. If we could get to the bottom of the ocean easily, we’d disturb those cycles too. We are like perpetual toddlers who still haven’t learned to have any self control.

All of this is very daunting. As a human that is currently feeling like a grain of sand blown from dune to dune I know there is little that I can do to influence the full scale of our problems. It’s easy to fall into despair and even depression. Where do we go?

We have to begin to reframe our focus. Focus on what we can influence in our homes, in our communities, with our neighbors, with our friends, with our local government. This is why I teach. Giving instruction, helping people gain skills, this is within my locus of control. Focusing on my community, this is within my locus of control. Making sure that all the animals that live with me are cared for, that is within my locus of control. Sometimes, in order to not feel crushed by all that is happening in the world, we need to shift our attention closer to home, to the actions and steps we can take.

The world is really heavy right now.

It’s time to put in down.