It was while reading Gwyne Dyer's Climate Wars a couple of years ago that I started to accept that, as a species, we are probably not going to avert cataclysmic forms of climate change.
As this disturbing fact has come to settle within me, it has been less a source of despair and despondency (though I do have my moments!), than a form of liberation. It has allowed me to see the world with fresh eyes.
I can see that the forms of denial of what is happening both within and around us in regards to climate change is a layered and deeply structural process. This dynamic is informed by, and in turn contributes to, the continuing, unfolding crises within the financial architecture of 'Pax Americana', the cornerstone of the United States Empire.
We are not merely living through a crisis in economic or technological control, but something much deeper, a crisis in civilisation. The foundational Greek and Hebraic imaginaries, and the deep mythical narratives that frame western civilisation, can no longer contain, inform, explain and extend, the parameters of what we experience. We are living in a crisis in storytelling.
Our relationship to our own and other species, to the past, present and future, to land, culture, science and Empire are framed and informed by many layers of stories. These have been told and retold in different guises, which at are rooted in the Greek and Hebraic imaginations.
Although there are many different cultures, in the last century the hydra-headed process known as capitalist globalisation, led in the last five decades by the US Empire, has colonised the globe. The fate of the planet is the fate of the US led imperial project known as civilisation.
If we are to understand and counter the roots of the self-destructive processes that civilisation has unleashed upon the bodies, psyches and ecosystems of the earth, then we need to become 'archeologists of memory'. We must look backwards and inwards, so uncovering, deciphering or inventing new stories that will help us deal with the enormity of what we are facing. We need new stories for a new time.
Key to this reflection is the recognition that something deep within our fractured and alienated beings is the source of this profound dis-ease. As such it is also potentially the wellspring of other, less destructive possibilities. Socrates' dictum 'know thyself' takes on a new urgent moral force.
Up till now there has been very little discussion, let alone action, directed to the social implications of climate change. What happens to a group of people who have been suckled on the glitz and speed of consumerism when their ability to consume is taken away from them? What fills this spiritual void? Why are we not probing and discussing this change together?
I recently visited Guatemala and Mexico for four months to immerse myself in another culture, to make documentaries for Radio National's 360documentaries program, and to witness first-hand the social experimentation underway in the underbelly of the US Empire.
Guatemala and Mexico have unique, intensely colourful and powerful landscapes, histories and societies. The contradictions they now face have much to do with their proximity to the US Empire, which is at many levels in a period of decline.
I learnt from visiting Central America that the US Empire is not going to unleash fascism to deal with its various crises. Fascism, in all of its guises, was the response of the nation-state, which has been superseded by the market state.
So what the US Empire has in store for us — and the research and development continues in Mexico and Colombia, as well as places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — is a new social formation that we do not even have a word for yet. It is part-narco, part-corporate, part-private military-corporation, and all nasty!
It moves and morphs at will, feeds off financial flows, emerges from the grey areas between the legal and illegal, national and international laws, has global aspirations and is taking terror to hitherto unimagined levels. Welcome to the Future!
This new monster is part of the armoury of how the US Empire in decline is preparing to deal with the crisis in civilisation. At present we do not even have the imaginary space to understand, let alone counter what is emerging on the horizon.
We desperately need new stories.
Colm McNaughton is a Walkley award winning documentary producer. His latest documentary La Frontera: a journey into the borderlands of Mexico and the United States is available here.