In 2008, worldwide consumption of bottled water surpassed 52 billion gallons. 86% of these bottles will not be recycled, but will rest in a landfill.

Should you care?

Rationally, there’s no reason to care. The bottles will be buried and mostly out of sight. Besides, with the human population exploding, and the developing world hungry to consume as much as the rest of us, humanity is doomed anyway.

In my recent interview with Charles Eisenstein, he shares much the same conclusion:

It is quite irrational to believe things will ever be much better than they are today. When you really study the situation the world is in, you realize that it is going to take a miracle, lots of miracles, so save us. The situation is quite hopeless, from a rational standpoint.

On the surface, that’s pretty depressing – and it’s fairly easy to give up and decide to carry on with “business as usual.”

But every so often, when we catch moments of stillness, when we relax the cold logic of rationality, we touch upon the beauty of intuition.

It’s intuition that grips our hearts when we view images like the one above, revealing the brutal effects of plastic pollution on wildlife. There’s something about it that feels… wrong.

It is the same feeling that demands we phrase the Gulf “oil spill” for what it truly is. As Naomi Klein writes:

The hole at the bottom of the ocean is more than an engineering accident or a broken machine. It is a violent wound in a living organism; that it is part of us.

It is the feeling that we are more intimately connected than we’ve been led to believe. Eisenstein describes this connection:

I think we know in our hearts that we have the power to create a beautiful world. It will only happen, though, if we listen to our heart’s knowing enough to actually carry out the actions necessary.

We are called to live according to what our hearts know. That is the only sure guide. That is also a true revolution.

The mental calculations we call ethics, minimizing your carbon footprint, etc., none of those are a sure guide. Like, should I fly to California to co-create a transformational event? Well, it burns a lot of jet fuel. How can I possibly add up all the costs and benefits? It is impossible.

When we try to choose from the head, we get into a maze of indecision, and even when we do choose we have no certainty and no courage. So now it is time to listen to our heart knowing.

Today, the holding bag was full… in fact, it was overfull.

I had to stuff quite hard to fit all the reusable bags in. After some generous stuffing… I made them fit. But something inside tweaked me for a second.

This was supposed to be a “green” solution to the mountains of plastic bags wasted every day. These mesh bags were supposed to be the answer. Save the planet! Bring a reusable bag.

And yet, here I was (albeit more slowly) collecting another mountain of bags. It was on odd observation… so odd that I felt compelled to wander back to my computer and Tweet it:

I’m positive there’s some sort of irony when you realize you’re drowning in reusable grocery bags…

The irony is that simply changing your shopping bags doesn’t address the real issue of rampant consumption – which is essentially how our entire society is structured. We have to buy things to keep our society humming. If I stop buying things, it puts people out of jobs. The Machine stops running. And if the Machine stops running… what’s the alternative?

No one really knows.

The only thing most people are starting to realize is that the Machine is no longer working.

A few hours after my intimate moment with the shopping bags, I came across a link posted by a friend from the book “The Ascent of Humanity.” Intrigued, I read the introduction…and lo and behold, I came across this passage:

Words like “high-tech” and “modern” lose their cachet as a multiplicity of crises converge upon our planet. If we are fortunate, we might, for a time, prevent these crises from invading our personal lives.

Yet as the environment continues to deteriorate, as job security evaporates, as the international situation worsens, as new incurable diseases appear, as the pace of change accelerates, it seems impossible to rest at ease.

The world grows more competitive, more dangerous, less hospitable to easy living, and security comes with greater and greater effort. And even when temporary security is won, a latent anxiety lurks within the fortress walls, a mute unease in the background of modern life. It pervades technological society, and only intensifies as the pace of technology quickens.

We begin to grow hopeless as our solutions—new technologies, new laws, more education, trying harder—only seem to worsen our problems. For many activists, hopelessness gives way to despair as, despite their best efforts, catastrophe looms ever closer.

This book explains why trying harder can never work. Our “best efforts” are grounded in the same mode of being that is responsible for the crisis in the first place.

As Audre Lord put it, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Soon, though, this mode of being will come to an end, to be replaced by a profoundly different understanding of the self, and a profoundly different relationship between human and nature. This book is about the gathering revolution in human beingness.

In Universe terms…that’s what’s called a “Booyah Grandma.”

Needless to say, I ordered the book.

P.S. I realized after writing this that perhaps finding inspiration from a shopping bag is not so strange after all.

“We have to address peak oil,” Robertson told the Georgia Straight at City Hall. “That’s a hard reality.…I think it could end up compounding the looming challenges we face with oil supply and an economy that’s totally dependent on cheap energy right now.”

Speaking of peak oill, I thought it an opportune time to re-post my interview I conducted with Rex Weyler on this very topic. Rex is a member of the Vancouver Peak Oil collective, and spoke with me about the challenges ahead.