Why The Guys In Suits Cannot Fix The Planet

This metal frame is the way our bureaucracies and our corporations and our academic bodies insist on organizing the world to extract the maximum amount of profit and control from every single living thing they encounter on this green earth.

However, the reality is that this metal frame represents a system that looks at a living forest and sees only board feet of timber and looks at a living community and sees only a demographic meant to be managed and marketed to by guys in suits who have never set foot on the actual ground. We are standing at a crossroads where we have to decide if we are going to keep forcing the world into our square boxes or if we are finally going to learn how to weave a little bit of grass into our steel to stop the whole thing from collapsing under its own weight.

Now there is another way to exist in this world that has survived despite our best efforts to pave over it with concrete and bureaucracy where some call this the Grass Basket, which represents a flexible and resilient way of holding knowledge. The problem we face right now is that the guys running the show have convinced us that the metal frame is the only thing keeping the sky from falling when in reality it is the very thing that is limiting our understanding of the planet and leading us to miss out on more durable solutions.

Therefore, you should consider for a moment the absolute inefficiency it took for those early explorers to show up on an island in the Pacific and decide that the plants and animals there did not have names until some guy named Linnaeus gave them a Latin one that nobody there could even pronounce. They were communities who had been living closely with these species for generations and they had names that described exactly what the plant did and who it was related to and when it bloomed and how it could heal you if you got sick.

But the institutional machine decided that those names did not count because they did not fit into the hierarchy that they had invented back in their swotty universities in Europe to make themselves feel like the masters of the universe and the owners of everything they saw. This was a deliberate act of ignoring local data to replace it with a system that turned living relatives into dead specimens to be pinned to a board inside a musuem, and sold to the highest bidder without a second thought for the practical information that was being lost.

Today, we are now seeing a massive shift where smart people are realizing that excluding this data was a terrible business decision because it left us with a map of the world that is missing half the landmarks and half the instructions on how to survive here. Communities are taking that metal frame of ours and they are dismantling it piece by piece to build something that actually works for them and their families and they are doing it because they know it is the best way to get things done.

In fact, this is what the academics call Scaffolding, and it is basically a fancy way of saying that these communities are taking the tools of the modern economy and using them to reinforce their own cultural foundations so they can thrive in the global market. They are taking the materials they need from the existing systems and weaving them into their own grass baskets to create a future that combines the best of both worlds and that should be a lesson for every single one of us.

Furthermore, some research shows us that this is a hard-nosed strategy for success in a world that demands innovation because there are communities out there right now that are making deals with mining companies and government agencies on their own terms. They are looking at the corporate contracts and the legal agreements and they are saying we will take this metal beam and we will use it to hold up our roof but we will not let you build the walls of our house or tell us how to live.

It is a brilliant bit of engineering that turns the weight of the structure into a support system for the people and, frankly, it is the kind of smarts we should all be applauding instead of ignoring because it might actually save us all in the long run. The scientific community in Aotearoa has been forced to wake up and admit that they have been ignoring a massive database of empirical evidence simply because it was stored in oral histories instead of peer-reviewed journals that nobody reads anyway.

It is called Mātauranga Māori, and it turns out that if you listen to the stories that have been passed down for centuries you actually learn a hell of a lot more about the history of earthquakes and tsunamis than you do by looking at a graph from the 1950s. These narratives are rigorous codifications of cause and effect that helped these people survive on a volatile set of islands for longer than the United States has even existed as a country and we are fools for ignoring them.

In fact, it feels embarrassing that it took us this long to admit that maybe the people who lived through the disasters might know a thing or two about how to survive them and maybe we should shut up and listen for a change instead of assuming we know everything. You have to look at the way language itself shapes the way we treat the Papa (mother earth) because the words we use are the tools we take to manage our resources and right now our tools are broken.

This means that, when you speak a language like ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, you are forced to acknowledge that the ʻAina (land in Hawaiian) is your partner and that the rain is your resource and that you have a responsibility to maintain them like they are your own assets because they literally are. In English we have stripped all the utility out of our words so that we can talk about a mountain as a pile of rocks and a river as a potential source of powerplant coolant stream, without understanding the damage we are doing to the system.

Now volunteers working in Hawaiʻi however found out that learning the names of the winds and the rains changed the way they looked at the dirt under their fingernails because suddenly they were part of a system that was bigger than their own ego and their own bank account. We are seeing what happens when you actually let local experts lead the scientific projects that are supposed to be studying their own backyards instead of sending in a bunch of strangers who do not know a Barn Owl from a Pūeo.

In fact, there was a project called ECLIPSE that monitored a volcanic zone and they put Māori researchers and emergency managers in charge of the team and let them run the show because they knew that the locals actually cared about the outcome more than anyone else. They sat down and built relationships and drank tea and figured out how to get the data they needed without disrespecting the mountain or the people who live in its shadow and who have to live with the consequences of whatever we do wrongfully.

So, the result was that they got better data and they got a community that actually trusted them, which is something that most scientists can only dream of because they are usually too busy looking at their screens to actually talk to the people standing right next to them. But of course the greedy guts at the top of the food chain are not satisfied with just mismanaging the land we walk on because now they have their eyes set on the bottom of the ocean.

There is an exciting new rush to mine the deep sea for the minerals they say we need for our electric car batteries, which is just another way of saying they want to strip mine one swath of the ecosystem to save another and they do not care about the math. For, we have mapped less than 30% of the ocean floor which means we have little to no idea what is down there and yet these companies are already preparing the excavators to sweep up the abyss.

We are treating the ocean like it is just a big open warehouse full of free stuff when in reality it may be the engine that keeps life stable and the air breathable for every single one of us on this floating rock we call home. If we let the metal frame of industrial capitalism smash into the delicate ecosystems of the deep sea across thousands of square miles, with so little knowledge of what is down there, we are going to disrupt something that we do not know how to fix and we may have to pay the price.

We need to apply the same scaffolding principles to the ocean that smart communities are using on land. This means weaving a system of governance that respects life in the water more than the money in the bank or the quarterly earnings report. The problem with the way we have done science in the past is that we have allowed the people with the checkbooks to decide what counts as knowledge and what counts as superstition and we let them get away with it.

We let them write the grammar books that turned vibrant local languages into dead lists of rules that made it easier for administrators to give orders to the population and keep them in line while they extracted everything that was not nailed down. We let them draw the maps that carved up the world into property lots and we let them write the history books that said civilization started when the bureaucrats showed up and started telling everyone what to do and how to do it.

Ultimately, it is time to throw out those old manuals and start listening to the people who were doing science and engineering and medicine long before some decided that they knew everything there was to know about the universe and our place in it. The truth is that we are all going to have to learn how to be a little more like the grass basket if we want to survive the mess we have made of the climate and the world we live in.

We need to be flexible and we need to be interconnected and we need to realize that our strength comes from our relationships with each other and with the earth and not from our ability to control everything we see with our machines and our spreadsheets. The metal frame has had a good run but it is rusting out and it is crushing the life out of us and it is time to put it down before it is too late to save ourselves.

We thus now have the blueprints for a better way of living right in front of us in the resurgence of these communities and the only question is whether we are smart enough to pick them up and read them before the clock runs out on us. This is about the fact that we are driving the bus toward a cliff and the only people who know how to hit the brakes are the ones they have been ignoring for five hundred years, pretending they do not exist.