It’s time to start living where we are

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/01/2023 (718 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My word for 2022 was “resilience,” nowhere better demonstrated this past year than in Ukraine.

For 2023, I offer a phrase instead: “Live close to home.”

This was the title of a book I published in in 2016, the third in my “scrub oak trilogy” that reflected on where we are, how we got here, and what comes next.

I would be surprised if you have read it — just because you publish good books (Bill McKibbin liked all three) doesn’t mean people buy them or read them.

To be fair, when local distribution consisted of one copy of each book in the Pets and Nature section of Chapters/Indigo (right next to the one on puppy training), the market wasn’t exactly saturated. And, while holding the launch of the trilogy at McNally Robinson meant some initial sales there, they soon tired of my pleas and pestering to keep ongoing stock.

As that publisher bluntly told me five years ago, declining the possibility of another book, no one was buying books about climate change and the environment anymore, shrugging off my protest that people don’t buy what they can’t get.

So, by promoting “live close to home” here, as the phrase for 2023, I will reach more readers, more quickly.

The argument is simple: we live in an unsustainable global culture that is rapidly getting worse, because we are always trying to be somewhere else rather than where we actually are.

Wireless devices offer the most obvious example — sitting in a coffee shop, doom-scrolling or texting instead of talking to the person seated across from you. We are oblivious to the irony of being active on social media, but never really being social with the people around us.

We know friending on Facebook or following on Instagram is not the same as being friends in person, but somehow that doesn’t change our behaviour. A supportive emoji is not the same as a real hug.

When we look past the cellphone screen, “home” is the place we leave when we want to have fun. We prefer travelling to exotic locations elsewhere, rather than contemplating what is in our own boring backyard. Somewhere else is always better than where we are.

There is the same problem with our money. Credit is money at a distance; we spend what we don’t yet have. By displacing our current finances to some future time, with interest, we turn today’s sale price into tomorrow’s debt burden.

Many of our staple foods come from a distance, from somewhere else, instead of being grown or produced right here, close to home. Worse, we don’t just skip the dishes, but the shopping and cooking, too, as we also expect our food to be prepared by someone else and delivered to our door.

This makes us vulnerable to “supply chain issues,” a phrase becoming more mainstream every week, as the climate changes and weather (or politics) affects the products we bring here from faraway places.

We avoid taking responsibility for the mess we are making of our planet, throwing things “away” without realizing the polluted air, water or waste always lands in someone’s backyard. On a round planet, what gets thrown away eventually ends up back where it started.

And so, by focusing on the distant instead of the local, and on the future instead of the present, we jeopardize the place where we are living right now. We might call it “home,” but it isn’t really. More of us are socially and emotionally homeless today than we realize, and that has serious psychological implications.

Whatever it looks like or whatever it means, everyone wants to have a home. But home has to be where we are at the moment, not where we wish we were. It is backyard reality, not Fantasy Island.

Home is also today, not tomorrow. The feeling of being home is present tense, not future, and thinking of home only in terms of the past tense (“I remember going home”) is just sad.

So, in 2023, live close to home. Focus on where you are, today, not where you were in the past, or where you fear you will be in the future. Create the home you need, where you are, right now.

We make choices today, not tomorrow. For a sustainable future, we need to make better choices today than we did yesterday — not huge ones, not amazing ones, just better ones. If we all did that, every day, what a powerful force for hope and change we would all become, together!

After all, a sustainable future is a dream, not a fantasy. Fantasy means escaping reality, but a dream guides our way forward. We dream from where we are, we dream of what we want, and then work toward it.

We need to dream of a home, right here, for ourselves and for all the children of Earth, and then start to make it happen.

Peter Denton’s latest book, The End of Technology, is available from the publisher, at KendallHunt.com.