The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. Photo: ITTraveler via Flickr.
Guy McPherson’s latest gift, Walking Away From Empire: A Personal Journey, is a necessary tonic, or more aptly perhaps, a high colonic, for those who have ears but refuse to hear the story of climate change and its pervasive affect on the life of man and the world.
This collection of essays proclaims loudly, and occasionally with raw emotion, that it’s time we took off our cultural blinders and acknowledged the obvious facts confronting humanity and the earth.
A time to be born, a time to die
The hegemony of Western civilization, whose ancient roots stretch back to the alluvial soils of the Fertile Crescent, is hurtling the planet toward an apocalyptic climate conclusion. The trajectory of our Empire, characterized by accelerating energy decline and global climate change — a trajectory that Homo sapiens sapiens started in motion approximately 6,000 years ago with the first city walls, but which truly gained its wholesale grip in the fossil fuel age— is nearing a terminal state.
There’s perhaps no better spokesperson to rage against this machine than McPherson.
A scientist, McPherson has a formidable background, with a specialization in ecology and evolutionary biology. But more than that he has an incredible capacity for honest introspection and moral reflection on the state of our times. A classic success story of the Western curriculum in his own right, it’s his unrelenting criticism and exposure of the destructive nature of the unspoken curriculum of the West that makes us sit up and take notice. He speaks in unvarnished language of “the horrific costs of imperial living: destruction of the living planet, obedience at home, and oppression abroad.” He writes
This entire, life-draining, life-sucking enterprise requires us to tell increasingly absurd lies and convince ourselves they are the truth. Fortunately, this requires little effort on our part because we are awash in cognitive dissonance as we swim in an ocean of cultural denial.
Collective memory
Walking Away From Empire: A Personal Journey by Guy McPherson, PublishAmerica, 2011, 230 pp, paperback, $24.95
In this highly provocative, philosophical, soul-baring, and at times humorous memoir, we find not simply one man’s journey through a personal or recent historical past, but a human journey into the deep past of our species.
It’s the recovery of this deep history — buried in the feral core of our species at the dawn of agriculture, domestication and civic life over two hundred generations ago — that informs and infuses his passion, social criticism, and ultimately his hope and optimism.
McPherson asks us to recollect the genetic memory of our Pleistocene origins, where genus Homo first emerged and later articulated itself as Homo sapiens. He warns us: either recover our innate love of, and respect for our home — earth and its myriad species — or perish on the bonfire of our newly acquired imperial vanities.
No pussyfooting around
This is not a book for the faint of heart. Its language is strong at times, like Turkish coffee. Its condemnation of the American Empire, brutal, like an ultimate fighting bout. And its conclusions as loud and clear as the sun at high noon.
However, Walking Away From Empire is not just the hollow cry of a lone madman shrieking at the moon. Rather, it’s the considered framework of an unlikely prophet showing a path forward for those who would listen. It’s a hopeful chorus for that “human, all too human” animal who still understands its wildness underneath the cultural trappings, and what we can do to inhabit that fertile place of freedom once again. Or at least survive the apocalypse that is surely upon us.
In this respect, the book is a radical call to action like no other. It’s the baring of one man’s soul in search of a “life of excellence.” This is no ordinary excellence. It’s an excellence uncovered, not by the straightjacket of Enlightenment rationality that underlies the curriculum of the West. But rather, through a more organic reasoning, where we recognize that our flesh and the flesh of the world are intertwined.
This is a book you will not put down; and having read it, you’ll no longer be able to ignore its conclusions.
Sandy Krolick, Transition Voice
About Sandy Krolick
