The news broke in October, during the lead up to the Paris Cop21. Exxon’s scientists investigated the effects of burning fossil fuels in the 1970ies and 80ies. Well-funded and highly skilled, they came carefully to the conclusion that rapid accumulation of green house gasses in the earth’s atmosphere was going to have serious deleterious effects upon life on earth. Perhaps, Exxon’s business plan should change?
But by 1988, when James Hansen went before Congress to announce that global warming had begun, Exxon, the wealthiest corporation in the history of money, had made its choice. Exxon CEOs decided to invest in doubt, not in renewable energy. They began openly to lie about the results their scientists had documented and to fund a variety of right-wing, anti-regulation, free-market so-called “think tanks” that would cast aspersions upon climate science for decades and result in a current Congress that does not “believe” in global warming.
Exxon’s malfeasance, their lead in creating an industry of climate denial that has worked to forestall any meaningful public policy in the public interest, and to the sabotage by the U.S. of previous Cops, though not new news, has become the study of a series of investigative articles by the Los Angeles Times and InsideClimate News. Now, the accumulating science, Exxon’s willful denial of it, and their funding of denier “think tanks” can be tracked, year by year.
But will any meaningful action be taken to hold the corporation accountable for what must rightly be called high crimes against humanity? Will Exxon be made to pay, with lengthy prison terms for corporate executives and gigantic penalty fees that would serve to bring them back to manageable, regulatable size, for the damage they have caused to earth and profited from, for the damage that is going to change life on this planet for millennia? Or will investors gather round the rogue company and continue to demand record profits uber ales?
When the psychiatrist Robert Lifton, whose Center on Violence and Human Survival I was a member of for years, wished to find out how ordinary people do horrible evil, he interviewed Nazi doctors. These physicians, who lived in close proximity to the death camps, used their medical knowledge to experiment on children and sent countless individuals to their doom. They went home at night or for weekends where by the accounts of spouses and their own children, they were kindly and attentive, good family men.
Lifton wondered how this could be so and he came up with the idea of “doubling” in an effort to explain the inexplicable. The Nazi doctors, he reasoned, simply cut their inner life in two. One half was reserved for their professional duties, “purifying the German race,” the work of extinction they practiced under medical guise, and the other for being normal guys, just enjoying life. “And each of these selves functioned as though it were a separate autonomous self,” Lifton explained.
I remembered his chilling conclusion this week when the news of Exxon Mobile’s top executives broke. Exxon’s well-funded scientific team uncovered the likely effects of continuing to burn fossil fuels in the late 1970s, a time, that is, before serious damage had been caused, when there was time to change course and avert the catastrophic weather events that have become the new norm. A decade later, 1980ies, their projected models showed the scope of the looming disaster. Exxon knew, that is, before James Hansen’s
testimony to Congress in 1988 that measurable global warming had begun. But their executives decided to cover up the truth.
Instead of turning their energies, if I might so use the word, to the creation of alternative, renewable sources, the company commanders decided to begin a hugely well-funded campaign to cast aspersion on the scientific data, and on the non-corporate climate scientists themselves, suggesting they were hoaxsters, that they lied about results, and suing and otherwise assaulting them. Evidently, climate scientists were worse than closet communists left over from the cold war. They were out to ruin capitalism by promoting questionable science in the hopes of unleashing draconian regulations on fossil fuels.
Poor Exxon feared that its favored status as a tax-dodging, mainly unregulated, under-taxed, wealth generating behemoth might be lost. Presumably, like the Nazi doctors, the Exxon execs continued to be kind to spouses and children, even household pets. They might have relished vacations in scenic wonder spots, and perhaps engaged with joy in outdoor sport. They were ordinary people, after all, doing an extraordinary thing—forgetting, or denying, or splitting off from what they knew, or, at very least, had been told by reputable scientists in their employ. Some of the scientists, like the Nazi’s “medical” men, continued on at Exxon, willfully joining in the lucrative delusion, others left. But, all and all, Exxon’s findings were pretty well hushed up. Deluded mainstream environmentalists, for their part, kept on trying to talk reason to the fossil fuel corporations, believing, seemingly rationally, that once rational people understood the gravity of global warming they would do the only reasonable thing and join the world-wide effort to get off fossil fuels and onto renewables.
But doubling proved more powerful than science, more powerful, even than the instinct to survive and to protect one’s off-spring from disaster. Psychic-splitting created a hallucinatory world, like a hall of mirrors at a carnival, where everything became distorted and reality ceased to exist. Suddenly, the delusions of the climate change deniers became the median truth. Those who spoke the language of science were called alarmists, or simply became unintelligible to those who resolutely did not want to know. And those who did not want to know became convinced that they were right and reasonable people defending truth, justice and the American way, against fancy-talking interlopers who used science to promulgate a hideous agenda, destruction of the free-market system.
Shall we kill our green earth for greed?
Against the psychological reality of criminal doubling, we might adhere to another psychic reality, first named by Erich Fromm and E.O. Wilson, which is inherent, Biophilia, or love of the natural world. This, too, is a way of being, powerfully potent, able, at the very least, to situate us morally as well as physically for the hard times ahead.
What does it mean to love the world? Biophilia is experiential and holistic, as the splitting of the psyche from itself to create two separate selves most definitely is not. Doubling numbs the body to its own devious actions in order to allow those very actions to continue, cutting off the self from its self, creating a disembodied person who does not know what he or she is doing. Rushing to fill the gap created by such slashing apart is consumerism, the endless amassing of things and the money, and of drugs of all sorts from the best of Western medicine to street snorts. Emptiness, anxiety, violence, suicidiality, addiction all result.
In contrast, Biophilia reassembles the broken self. Biophilia acknowledges wholeness, and affirms as the Quakers say, “that we are members of one another.” Edward O. Wilson argued “that humans evolved as creatures deeply enmeshed with the intricacies of nature, and that we still have this affinity with nature ingrained in our genotype.” Recognize this, he said, and “the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained.” Become like a naturalist, he urged, wherever you are, take a long look at a leaf, a bug.
Step into nature for a moment, as I do, though a city dweller, with my dogs each morning in Fort Greene Park, designed by Fredrick Olmsted in the 19th Century with many of the original trees showing their gnarled roots and spreading their large branches overhead. Up on the hill is a particularly verdant stand of the old elms and oaks, well-spaced, but close enough to feel enclosed, not as in a forest, yet sheltered from the city surround. Around me, I can see the sky-scrapers rising, but standing underneath and between the old trees, I can feel myself return not just to me but to the natural world of which I am part. My breath slows and deepens. My heart expands. A delicious peace sweeps over, through and around me. Whatever the day may hold, whatever the terrible news of the day that is happening to others, to refugees, or those in prisons, I take these moments to fortify myself not against but in order to better witness and bear the suffering outside. I am lucky to be healthy, to have hiked here with the two cockers who are romping around, running in circles just to run. I am lucky to be still and admire the movements of the animal flesh, the delicious joy of all the city dogs for a moment in the morning park returned to themselves as if they were free. We have come home, it feels, humans and animals, alike. The squirrels and birds, the dogs, children, the joggers and yoga practitioners near the monument to Revolutionary War dead put there at the behest of this park’s founder, Walt Whitman; we are fully in our bodies and at one with ourselves.
This is Biophilia, love of the natural world, at work, or rather working on us; it is this energy of the living world, once we step into it and pause, that reassembles and fortifies the psyche, deepens the breath, enlarges consciousness, and stimulates imagination. When I come from the park it is often with fresh sentences running through my head. I will sit down to write responding to the instinctual awakening of the imagination that is a gift of nature and which links me to Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Thoreau, that moral and imagistic literary tradition roused by the splendor of this land. I will go through the day with more awareness of my small but special place among the many, feeling that I, too, am sheltered and cared for by the natural world to which I shall someday, rather soon, return.
I don’t know how it happened or why, growing up in a mixed marriage in what was a secular house, worshipping no god, and perhaps this is why, but I always understood even as a child that death was about a return, not an ascent to heaven, nor annihilation, but a return to the natural world—that my spirit would become one, again, with a vast and awesome, complex whole, that while my consciousness would surely vanish without trace, all that had been alive in me was going rejoin the eternal round of seasons, winds and weather that is world. It was growing up with animals, horses, mainly, and near a big Midwestern lake; growing up in a time when children were let out the door in the morning and came home at dark and didn’t have to, and often did not dare, tell their parents where they’d been or what had happened during the day. It was ice-skating on a playground that was frozen with a hose from late October well into March, racing a horse bareback through the woods, being scratched by branches, hooting, or entering a barn of an early, frosty morning, watching the steam rise from the golden urine-filled straw, inhaling the sensual smells of flesh and manure, being greeted with a whiny, leaning a cold cheek against a warm shoulder. It was feeling at home, forever, in the world. Death would take me back to this.
Now, the world is lurching into a new, unknown reality we can foresee but cannot truly imagine. What does sea level rise actually mean to New York? When will mass extinction strike a species close to me? What will the next hurricane, the next massive snow or rainfall or drought do to my neighbors? What will it be like not to be able to secure food to eat or water? How much will I be willing to give up, to share, and at what point does my own survival instinct lead me to hoard and take and hurt someone else? A functioning civil society and serviceable infrastructure have saved me from experiences like this. Only Hurricanes Sandy and Irene provided tastes of what is sure to come. To the extent that we “know” but do not truly know in our flesh the future, we have all been cast into states of doubling.
Against the coming disruptions wrought by climate change, brought upon by Exxon’s lies and corporate greed to a significant degree, we have only Biophilia. It is time to love the world fiercely, to reawaken childhood memories of the self in nature, to return to the park, the shore, the pond, wherever there can be found a moment with other species in which to breathe. It is time to remember, literally, to meld ourselves back together with the nature that gives us water, earth and air, feeds imagination and deepens consciousness. Now, we need open ourselves to the calls of the world and its creatures. Biophilia does not fail. It arouses mystery within our souls, excites our imaginations, and takes us beyond ourselves. As with a dying child or spouse we find extra reserves of love in our hearts to be with the world and to do what we must.
For if we can Love hard enough the living world around us, we will mobilize ourselves to change our ways so that we might save whatever we can, preserve and protect, memorialize, mourn, cherish and celebrate the life-giving natural world that has been given us and with which ultimately we are One.
And doing this, will give us the strength and clear-sightedness, as well, to sue the bastards at ExxonMobile and demand they be punished for how they split themselves off from life and put our world at risk, for the sake of extraordinary 19 percent profits—made because they do not pay for any of the environmental and health damages they create. Newly energized by our consciously adhered to love for the earth on which we live, we will confront ExxonMobile, Shell and the others over their costly disinformation campaigns and legislate heavy fines for the damage they’ve done. We will use this money to create and subsidize solar, wind and hydroelectric energy grids and mass transportation systems. And we’ll mandate that the rest of the stores of fossil fuels remain ground as “stranded assets”, unnecessary for human well-being and dangerous to the biosphere.